Walker Reader

Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent several years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California; Portland, Oregon; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and is currently based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019.

His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018.

By Sky Hopinka

An Indigenous Lens Is a Tool to Create Understanding

“The biggest lesson I learned while starting out making films is that I don’t need permission to make work that isn’t conventional or breaks the formal rules we’re taught to follow. Rather, the permission that I am seeking is that of the people and the communities I film.” In the fifth edition of Soundboard, filmmaker Sky Hopinka joins Adam Khalil, Alex Lazarowich, and Hud Oberly in addressing the question, “What does it mean to have an Indigenous lens in film?”

Moving Image

By Sky Hopinka

The Centers of Somewhere

“A difference between learning and knowing is little more than asking questions without the entitlement of an answer, and honoring the vulnerability in saying and hearing, ‘I don’t know.’” In his Artist Op-Ed, experimental filmmaker Sky Hopinka ruminates on power, privilege, and identity—including his own—as he responds to the burden of representation and authority placed on groups of traditionally oppressed people.