Cannupa Hanska Luger is an award-winning artist and cultural innovator whose expansive creative and philosophical practice introduces new methodologies and speculative technologies rooted in Indigenous innovation to challenge 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. Through bold visual storytelling, Luger offers new ways of seeing our shared humanity while centering an Indigenous worldview. His socially engaged, interdisciplinary practice spans public art, large-scale installation, ceramic sculpture, performance, time-based media, writing, and land-based actions of repair, blending critical cultural analysis and Indigenous advocacy with a deep respect for the materials, landscapes, and communities he engages.

Luger is a National Geographic Explorer and was named a Grist climate leader for advancing solutions to our planet's most pressing challenges. He has been featured on the cover of National Geographic and profiled in The New York Times Magazine and Art21. In 2026, Luger received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for his debut book, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide. Other recent honors include an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Maine College of Art & Design, the National Geographic Society Wayfinder Award, the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship Award, and the Ourworlds Immersive Visual Arts Award.

Previous distinctions include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and the Monument Lab Fellowship (2024), Soros Arts Fellowship (2023), Guggenheim Fellowship (2022), United States Artists Fellowship (2021), Creative Capital Fellowship and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020), Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Award (2019), and the Museum of Arts and Design's inaugural Burke Prize (2018).

Luger's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Times Square Arts Midnight Moment (New York, NY), 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.

His work is held in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI), Nordamerika Native Museum (Zürich, Switzerland), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA).

Luger is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York and maintains a studio practice in Glorieta, New Mexico.