Cannupa Hanska Luger is an award-winning artist and cultural innovator whose expansive creative and philosophical practice introduces new methodologies, ideas, and speculative technologies that reflect Indigenous innovation and shift collective thinking.

Born on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) and Lakota. His bold visual storytelling offers new ways of seeing our shared humanity while centering an Indigenous worldview.

With a socially engaged, interdisciplinary practice spanning public art, large-scale installation, ceramic sculpture, performance, time-based media, writing, and land-based actions of repair, Luger’s work blends critical cultural analysis with Indigenous advocacy and deep respect for the diverse materials, landscapes, and communities he engages.

Luger has been featured on the cover of National Geographic, profiled in The New York Times Magazine and Art21, and is the recipient of numerous honors for his groundbreaking work.

In 2025, he received the National Geographic Wayfinder Award, an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Maine College of Art & Design, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, and the Ourworlds Immersive Visual Arts Award. He was awarded the 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and named a 2024 Monument Lab Fellow. Luger is a 2023 Soros Arts Fellow, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2021 United States Artists Fellow in Craft, as well as a 2021 Grist Changemaker. He was also named a 2020 Creative Capital Fellow, a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design’s inaugural Burke Prize in 2018.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Times Square Arts Midnight Moment (New York, NY), the Sharjah Biennial 16 (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates), the 81st Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (Shanghai, China), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Kunsthal KAdE (Amersfoort, Netherlands), the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (Atlanta, GA), among others.

Luger’s work is held in many public collections, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI), the Nordamerika Native Museum (Zürich, Switzerland), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA).

He is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery (New York, NY) and maintains a studio practice in Glorieta, New Mexico.