Sky Hopinka (born 1984)[1] is an American visual artist and filmmaker who is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people.[2] Hopinka was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.[3]
Hopinka's undergraduate education was at Portland State University (PSU), where he became interested in documentary film. He received a Bachelor of Arts in liberal arts.[6][2] While at PSU, he started to take interest in Indigenous language revitalization.[5]
Hopinka's work deals with personal interpretations of homeland and landscape; the correlation between language and culture in relation to home and land.[2] Hopinka has said: "Deconstructing language [through cinema] is a way for me to be free from the dogma of traditional storytelling and then, from there, to explore or propose more of what Indigenous cinema has the possibility to look like."[6]
Hopinka organized a film program called What Was Always Yours and Never Lost focused on indigenous experimental cinema. The film series began in 2016 and was later shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial.[17]
Teaching
Hopinka is former associate professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where he taught film, video and animation. He is currently assistant professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College.[18] He has also taught Chinuk Wawa, an Indigenous language of the Lower Columbia River Basin.[2]
2019, Media City Film Festival's Chrysalis Fellowship to work on post-production of małni—towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020)
2018–19, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University fellowship to work on to post-production work on a feature-length experimental film, titled Imał. This film has been described as "wandering through a neomythological approach to explore an Indigenous presence of language and culture in the Pacific Northwest".[2]
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