We are thrilled to welcome acclaimed filmmaker Sky Hopinka to the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts as part of our Visiting Artist Series. Join us Thursday, February 20th, for a screening and Q&A of a collection of his short films (seperate event here), followed by an artist talk on Friday, February 21st (details below). 

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) 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 Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. 

His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles, France. He is the recipient of the Infinity Award in A from the International Center and the Alpert Award for Film/Video and fellowships including The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Art Matters, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Forge Project. In the fall of 2022, Hopinka received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work as a visual artist and filmmaker.

February 21st, 2025
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM 

USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex
Room SCA 112 
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007

We have limited space available for this event. Please write to us as soon as possible to secure your spot. To RSVP, email [email protected]. 

This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and USC School of Cinematic Arts.