Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie was born into the Bear Clan (Taskigi) of the Seminole Nation and born for the Tsi'naajínii Clan of the Navajo Nation. Her mother, Minnie June Lee McGirt-Tsinhnahjinnie (1927[1]-2016), was Seminole and Muskogee and her father, Andrew Van Tsinajinnie (1916-2000), was Navajo.[2] Her father was a painter and muralist who studied at the Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico.[3]

Tsinhnahjinnie was born in 1954 in Phoenix, Arizona.[4] She moved to the Navajo Reservation in 1966. In 1975, she began her art education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In 1978, Tsinhnahjinnie enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting with a photography minor in 1981.[5] She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts from University of California, Irvine in 2002.[6]

Tsinhnahjinnie began her career as a painter, but "turned to photography as a weapon when her aesthetic/ethnic subjectivity came under fire."[7] Her body of work "plays upon her own autobiography and what it means to be a Native American."[8] Her work uses photography as a means to re-appropriate the Native American as subject. Although she is a photographer, Tsinhnahjinnie often hand-tints her photographs or uses them in collage.[5] She has also used unusual supports for her work, such as car hoods. She shoots her own original photographs, but also frequently retools historical photographs of Native Americans to comment upon the ethnographic gaze of nineteenth-century white photographers. Tsinhnahjinnie also works in film and video.[9]

Tsinhnahjinnie's work has recently been shown in exhibitions including Contemporary Traces on Ancient Land[10] at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, CA (2019), and a solo show, which she also curated, entitled Witnessing Resurgence: Portraits of Resilience[11] at the CSU-Sacramento Library Gallery (2018).

She currently serves as the Director of the C.N Gorman Museum at the University of California, Davis. She is also, Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. At Davis, she has organized conferences, such as "Visual Sovereignty" in 2009, which brought together indigenous photographers from around the world to discuss the topic of sovereignty in visual culture.[12]

"I have been photographing for thirty-five years, but the photographs I take are not for White people to look at Native people. I take photographs so that Native people can look at Native people. I make photographs for Native people."[13]

"It was a beautiful day when the scales fell from my eyes and I first encountered photographic sovereignty. A beautiful day when I decided that I would take responsibility to reinterpret images of Native peoples. My mind was ready, primed with stories of resistance and resilience, stories of survival. My views of these images are aboriginally based - an indigenous perspective - not a scientific godly order but philosophically Native."[14]

• Lidchi, Henrietta and Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J., eds. Visual Currencies: Native American Photography. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2008.
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. and Passalacqua, Veronica, eds. Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photographers. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1-59714-057-7.
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. "Our People, Our Land, Our Images." Native Peoples Magazine. Nov/Dec. 2006
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. "Native American Photography." The Oxford Companion to Photography Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. "When is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?" Photography's Other Histories. C. Pinney and N. Peterson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003: 40-52

• Lester, Patrick D. The Biographical Directory of Native American Painters. Norman: The Oklahoma University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8061-9936-9.
• Reno, Dawn. Contemporary Native American Artists. Brooklyn: Alliance Publishing, 1995. ISBN 0-9641509-6-4.
• Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. and Passalacqua, Veronica, eds. Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photography. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1-59714-057-7.
• Celia Stahr. "Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 6 Mar. 2016. <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2022070>.
• Rushing III, W. Jackson. Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 978-0415137485
• Paul Apodaca, et al. "Native North American Art." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 6 Mar. 2016.<http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T061112pg1>.

• Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, official site