Sky Hopinka is an Artist and a Filmmaker whose work has been featured in Festival throughout the U.S. and Canada. His films explore Colonial influences on Native American Culture using text, language and vibrant imagery.

Sky Hopinka is a Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. Sky Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, and Portland, Oregon. He spent much of his childhood summers in the backseat of the family van as they traveled the country attending powwows. That experience pours into his videos with some images filmed through a car window.

In Portland, Oregon he studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin, hence his work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and the facets of culture contained within. Sky Hopinka 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.

Sky Hopinka work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts festival, Images Festival, Courtisane Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and the LA Film Festival.

Sky Hopinka builds narrative by layering sounds and images, words and perspectives, to form a complex tapestry in which the personal, communal, natural, and historical are intertwined.

In his experimental documentary films, language represents both a means to knowledge and a frustrating hindrance to understanding.

Hopinka was awarded jury prizes at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, the More with Less Awards at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and 3rd Prize at the 2015 Media City Film festival.