Pre-recorded discussion featuring Sky Hopinka (Director) and Marina Isgro (Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden)

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. 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, and currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.

Marina Isgro joined the Hirshhorn in 2020 as Robert and Arlene Kogod Secretarial Scholar, Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art. She is the curator of the forthcoming exhibition John Akomfrah: Purple, and has brought works by artists Sondra Perry and Jacolby Satterwhite into the collection. Isgro was previously a fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, where she curated Nam June Paik: Screen Play (2018). A specialist in video, performance, kinetic art, and other forms of time-based media, she has published peer-reviewed articles in Art Journal and Tate Papers. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Princeton University.