About

Sonya Dagata is a Swiss-Tunisian-American director, screenwriter, and photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her style is defined by a fraught relationship with identity, a commitment to fiction-based storytelling, and stylized, conceptual photography. She gravitates toward paradox, dark comedy, and the absurd and seeks out beauty in darkness and vice versa, both on the page and through the lens.

Sonya studied screenwriting and directing at the Prague Film School, where she developed her thesis film, And Then God Laughed. The 27-minute short went on to win Best Thesis Film at PFS and competed internationally at numerous festivals.

She went on to co-write Nour, a feature film written under the tutelage of Ghalya Lacroix (Blue is the Warmest Color, The Secret of the Grain) developed at Le Groupe Ouest in 2024, as well as Washed Away, for which she received the Best Short Screenplay Award in 2025 at Valence Scénario: International Festival for Screenwriters and Composers.  For more information on these projects in development, contact info@sonyadagata.com.

In the meantime, based in Brooklyn, she works as a freelance photographer and director, collaborating mainly with independent artists, while also photographing behind the scenes with Radio Music Hall’s Rockettes, for Madison Square Garden Productions.

Notable festivals:

• Valence sénario : Palmarès du meilleur scénario de court métrage, 2025

• Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival (Bafta and Oscar qualifying)

• Miami Short Film Festival

• FilmQuest - WINNER: Best Comedy Short

• Feratum Film Festival - WINNER: Best International Short.

• Splat!FilmFest - Méliès d’Argent Official Contender

• Lund International Fantastic Film Festival 

• Macabro: International Horror Film Festival of Mexico City

• Caostica Bilbao

Sonya has worked in New York, Mexico City, Prague, Paris, and Tunis. She works in English, French, and Spanish and writes in English and French.