Malni: Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore (2020) video still
Sky Hopinka (b. 1984) is an American visual artist and filmmaker who is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people. Hopinka was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Hopinka's work deals with personal interpretations of homeland and landscape; the correlation between language and culture in relation to home and land. 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."
His film and video work has been featured at Media City Film Festiva, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Walker Art Center, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Biennial, Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Sundance Film Festival, ImagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, New York Film Festival, among others.
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.
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. He has also taught Chinuk Wawa, an Indigenous language of the Lower Columbia River Basin.
Malni: Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore (2020) video still
Malni: Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore (2020) video still
Malni: Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore (2020) video still