Sky Hopinka appointed Assistant Professor in Film Production
The School for the Contemporary Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Sky Hopinka as Assistant Professor in Film Production.
Beginning September, 2019, Sky will be joining faculty members Christopher Pavsek, Simone Rapisarda, and Noé Rodríguez in the SCA’s collaborative and cohort-based Film program, which combines rigorous technical training and skills development with extensive instruction in cinema studies and history, as well as interdisciplinary coursework and interaction with students and faculty across the school.
Sky Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians. He was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, Milwaukee, WI, 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 Indigneous 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 a recipient of the 2019 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship.
His work has played at various festivals and exhibitions including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths at TIFF, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and Projections at the NYFF. 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.
Find out more about Sky and his work HERE.
Fainting Spells (excerpt)
Total run time: 10:45, 2018.
Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant – used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted.