Dyani White Hawk

In a practice across media, Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) strives to create inclusive works that draw from her breadth of life experiences: Native and non-Native, urban, academic, and cultural education systems. White Hawk’s painting and sculptural practice commonly foregrounds aesthetic and relational histories between Lakota art forms and what is called modern art. Her works in performance, video, and photography caringly and critically consider Indigenous language, intergenerational knowledge, and the protection of life, which seek to, in her words, “encourage conversations that challenge the lack of representation of Native arts, people and voices in our national consciousness while highlighting the truth and necessity of equality and intersectionality.”

Featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, followed by a permanent commission at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, White Hawk’s art has been the subject of numerous institutional solo exhibitions, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO (2022), the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC (2022), and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2021). In 2025, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Remai Modern, Saskatoon, will present the survey exhibition, Dyani White Hawk: Love Language.

White Hawk’s work is widely collected, including by the Aktá Lakota Museum, Denver Art Museum, Gochman Family Collection, Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and the Walker Art Center.

Recently acknowledged with the Guggenheim Fellowship and Creative Capital Grant (both 2024) and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2023), White Hawk has also received the Anonymous Was a Woman Grant and McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship (both 2021), the Bemis Alumni Award (2020), and United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art (2019), among many other honors. 

White Hawk was the gallery director and curator for the All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis from 2011 to 2015. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011) and a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe (2008).

Born in 1976 in Madison, Wisconsin, White Hawk is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

www.dyaniwhitehawk.com