FotoFocus Presents: Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) is a filmmaker, video artist, and photographer. Currently based in New York, he was born and raised in Ferndale, WA. His work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape—designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal and non-fictional forms of media. He is fluent in Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. Hopinka is an Assistant Professor of Film at Bard College. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, and is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

His work has played at festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. Hopinka was part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial, and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou, and has had solo exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in 2020 and at LUMA in Arles, France in 2022. Hopinka was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow, an Art Matters Fellow, a recipient of an Alpert Award for Film/Video, a Guggenheim Fellow, and was a Forge Project Fellow. He received a BA from Portland State University and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.