Sunflower Siege Engine (2022)

​​Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) is a filmmaker, visual artist, poet, and curator born in Ferndale, Washington, in 1984. His film and video works centre on personal positions of Indigenous homelands and landscapes, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received an MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2016). In Portland, he studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. Hopinka’s films, installations, calligrams, and photographs have been widely exhibited at festivals, galleries, and museums around the world, including Centre Pompidou, The Museum of Modern Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, ImagineNATIVE Festival, Sundance Film Festival, New York Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial (2017), Toronto International Film Festival, and six previous editions of Media City Film Festival, winning third prize for his film Jáaji Approx. (2015) which had its festival premiere at the festival. He is the recipient of a Radcliffe Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard (2018–2019), a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship (2019), an MCFF Chrysalis Fellowship (2019–2020), Guggenheim and MacDowell Colony Fellowships (2020), a MacArthur Fellowship (2022), Herb Alpert Award (2020), and MacArthur “Genuis Grant” (2022). His work is in permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Walker Art Center, among others. Hopinka is co-founder of COUSIN, a collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous media artists expanding traditional definitions of the moving image. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He lives and works between Boston, Massachusetts, and upstate New York.