Heidi Kumao

Heidi E Kumao creates animations, video installations, photographs, machine art, and fabric works to give physical form to the emotional dynamics underlying ordinary conversations and relationships. Using a feminist lens, she translates these intangible experiences into poetic visual narratives and hybrid art forms that have included: electromechanical girl’s legs that “misbehave,” video installations about surviving confinement, surreal experimental stop motion puppet animations, performative staged photographs, cinema machines, and sewn fabric drawings. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally in the USA, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, China, Australia, Spain and Canada. Her hybrid film, “Swallowed Whole,” about breaking her back, screened in over 25 film international film festivals and was awarded “Best Experimental Film” at the Female Eye and Humboldt International Film Festivals in 2015. She has received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan where she teaches video, animation, and media art.