Ahead of Sky Hopinka’s visiting artist lecture on February 24, 2026, discover how the artist and filmmaker’s practice navigates between personal and collective histories to explore Indigenous identity.
Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians.
Raised in Ferndale, Washington, Hopinka centers his practice on personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, an exploration of place that’s inextricably linked to language. While living in Portland, Oregon, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. By integrating linguistic roots into his video, photography, and text, Hopinka investigates how language operates as a “container of culture” and the ways identity is preserved and expressed.
He is a 2022 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow.
Hopinka has earned some of the most prestigious honors in the arts. In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship, he was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the 2020 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, and the winner of the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2023.
His work challenges the idea of the “objective” observer.
Hopinka is a self-described “subjective filmmaker.” He embraces his role as a participating observer, often sharing rough cuts with his subjects to ensure they are comfortable with their portrayal. By using kinetic camerawork and multilayered sound design, he seeks to evoke the feeling of a space rather than merely documenting the facts of it.
He premiered his second feature-length film, Powwow People, at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025.
Powwow People is a vérité-style documentary grounded in the rhythms, relationships, and lived experience of a contemporary Native gathering. Hopinka and his collaborators organized the powwow at the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle, culminating in a 30-minute unbroken shot of a Northern Traditional dance special that draws the viewer into the collective presence of the moment.
His practice explores how knowledge is held, remembered, and transformed over time.
In works like Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021), which was commissioned by ICA Miami, Hopinka traverses the memory of place through an original syntax of storytelling. By interweaving scattered landscapes with layers of captured audio and poetic text, he creates a rhythmic account of the spiritual implications of colonial history. These pieces transmute ideas of land, sky, and myth into a fluid reflection on how Indigenous personhood persists through time.
Join us on February 24 at 5:30 pm in Kresge Theatre to hear more from Sky Hopinka. Full details here.