Joanna Malinowska

Polish-born visual artist Joanna Malinowska received her B.F.A., with high honors, from Rutgers University in 1998, and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale University in 2001.

She interspersed her various visiting academic positions—at Rutgers (2004), Cornell University (2007), Princeton University (2008), and the Internationale Sommerakademie fuer Bildende Kunst, in Salzburg, Austria (2008)—with residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2001), Cuts and Burnz video program (2003), and the Smack Mellon Artists Studio Program (2006-07).

Beginning in 2002, she has participated regularly in group exhibitions at such venues as Tuckernecker, DUMBO, Canada, and Art in General in New York City; Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland; Kunst Werke in Berlin, Germany; Laznia Contemporary Art Centre in Gdansk, Poland; and biennales and festivals in Vienna and Moscow. Her work In Search of the Miraculous, Continued . . . , was part of a two-person exhibition at Canada gallery, and was given a solo exhibition at Galeria Okna, Contemporary Art Centre, in Warsaw, Poland, the same year. Venetia Kapernekas Gallery in New York featured her work Umanaqtuaq in a solo exhibition in 2007.

Her long-standing interest in the fast-disappearing cultures of Native Americans and Inuits has strongly influenced her work. For her video Umanaqtuaq (2007) Ms. Malinowska traveled to the Inuit village of Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic, retracing in her own way the path of famed anthropologist Franz Boas, to produce a documentary about Jimmy Ekho, an Inuit folk musician and Elvis Presley impersonator. For her Guggenheim Fellowship project, she will be traveling north, to the indigenous people of Alaska, the Aleutian Archipelago, and the Canadian North, documenting their disappearing languages and cultures, with the intention of producing a new video art and music performance/radio piece.