Sky Hopinka
Sherri Burt Hennessey Artist in Residence and Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts
Academic Program Affiliation(s): Film and Electronic Arts
Biography:
Sky Hopinka is a video artist, filmmaker, and teacher of Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the lower Columbia River Basin. A Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka has had his work screened at festivals and venues including Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Toronto; Projections, New York Film Festival; Sundance Film Festival; 2017 Whitney Biennial; 2018 FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; and at festivals in Ecuador, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Russia, New Zealand, and Spain, among other countries. He was named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow; other honors include Art Matters Artist Fellowship; Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship; Filmmaker Magazine 25 New Faces of Film, 2018; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, Harvard University; Jury Award, 2018 Chicago Underground Film Festival; 2017 Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists; More with Less Award, 2016 Images Festival; Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival; and Princess Grace Graduate Film Scholarship. Recent works include maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020), a documentary portrait, spoken mainly in Chinuk Wawa, of two Pacific Northwest natives who contemplate the afterlife, rebirth, and place in-between, and the shorter video works Lore, Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer, Fainting Spells, and Dislocation Blues. Publications include Around the Edge of Encircling Lake (2018), a collection of writings and calligrams. Hopinka previously taught at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.BA, Portland State University; MFA, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. At Bard since 2020.