A Colorado native, Yuri Chicovsky is a pianist and poet by training, with a BA in English Literature from the University of Colorado Boulder obtained in 2003. His artistic pursuits include photography, filmmaking, and musical composition. In 2009 he declined a scholarship to Berklee School of Music to begin work on his first feature-length film, Sage Country. Drawn by the stark beauty of the Western landscape and the poetic simplicity of the life of a sheep ranching man, he has been documenting the lives of the Villard sheep ranching family for the
past 8 years. Sage Country is slated for completion in 2019. In 2016, Chicovsky received a fellowship from the Independent Filmmaker Project Documentary Lab to advance Sage Country to completion through ongoing mentoring and networking opportunities provided by the IFP.