Decolonial / Experimental

Visual artist, filmmaker, and educator Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation) addresses decolonial practices and methodologies within Indigenous experimental cinema in this iN commissioned 40 min video abstract lecture.

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. Honors include an 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.