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2023

Powwow People

Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund Grantee

  • Sky Hopinka, Director
  • John Cardellino, Producer
  • Adam Piron, Producer
Powwow People film still

About the Project

Powwow People is a feature-length documentary inviting viewers into the world of contemporary Native American powwow culture. Told through the poetic lens of visual artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga), the film is an intimate portrait of a Native American powwow organized, hosted, and documented through the production of this film.

Project Team

    Sky Hopinka Headshot. Sky is wearing a black hat and a black jacket.

    Sky Hopinka

    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 nonfiction 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 was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, and is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

    John Cardellino Headshot

    John Cardellino

    John Cardellino (Producer) is the Founder/Producer of future perfect limited, a US-based film and art production company. Current projects include Sky Hopinka's Powwow People, Lawrence Burney’s Revisiting Ramona, and Savannah Wood’s Hard to Get and Dear Paid For. John was previously Producer of Sundance Institute's Art of Nonfiction Initiative, a program designed to encourage and support inventive artistic practice in documentary filmmaking. Supported artists and films included Garrett Bradley's Time, RaMell Ross' Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Kitty Green's The Assistant, Brett Story's The Hottest August, Kirsten Johnson's Dick Johnson is Dead, and Sky Hopinka's MAɬNI – Towards the Ocean, Towards The Shore. John earned an MFA in Curatorial Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

    Adam Piron Headshot

    Adam Piron

    Adam Piron (Producer) is a filmmaker based in Southern California. He's a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, a Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) descendant and was raised in Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to his filmmaking, he is the Director of Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program, and a member of the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Programming Team. Piron has served on competition juries and panels for film festivals such as imagineNATIVE Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film festival, Maoriland Film Festival, Palm Springs International ShortFest, Hot Springs Film Festival, and Art House Convergence. He has served as a mentor for the Whistler Film Festival's Aboriginal Filmmaker Fellowship and as a NATIVe Partner Representative at the Berlin International Film Festival. He has also guest programmed showcases of Native Cinema at the Borscht Film Festival and the Eastern Oregon Film Festival and has also been a reader for Creative Capital.