Sky Hopinka's Biography

Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Pacific Northwest, and began to take an interest in documentary filmmaking. In Milwaukee, he enrolled in a graduate degree in experimental filmmaking and discovered unconventional ways of documentary filmmaking that enabled him to uniquely express his interest in Indigenous languages and Native American life today. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge.

Hopinka’s work has played at prestigious festivals including Sundance Film Festival, Utah; Toronto International Film Festival, Ontario; Courtisane Festival, Ghent; Festival Punto de Vista, Pamplona; and the New York Film Festival, New York. His work has also been recognized internationally in numerous solo exhibitions at institutions like the Center for Curatorial Studies–Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2020); Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis (2020); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021); LUMA, Arles, France (2022); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2023); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2024); and Kunsthalle Friart, Switzerland (2024). Moreover, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); the Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2023); and the Göteborg International Biennial, Sweden (2023).

Sky Hopinka’s films, videos, and photographs are in the collections of some of the most important museums in the world. Additionally, Hopinka was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge (2018–19); Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow, Sundance Institute, Los Angeles (2019); Guggenheim Fellow for Creative Arts (2020); Forge Project Fellow (2021); and a MacArthur Fellow (2022). His multiple awards include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Film, & Video (2020); the Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography (2022); and the Persistence of Vision Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival (2025).