Sky Hopinka (born 1984)[1] is an American visual artist and film-maker 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 Foundation Grant 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]
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]