Steven J. Yazzie

Steven J. Yazzie (Navajo) is a multi-discipline artist working with video, painting, sculpture and installation environments. His professional career spans a long exhibition list of national and international institutions, most notably at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe, NM. As a director of video and film production, he brings implicit technical and creative skillsets from the visual arts into new forms of dynamic and meaningful storytelling. As a Native artist and practitioner, and owner of Digital Preserve Production Company, his multidisciplinary art expertise is focused on leveraging Indigenous issues and voices. As  an IRISE Community Scholar, he is addressing issues of inequality through the multiple mediums. Among developing connections with the DU IRISE community, he is also working with Drs. Ramona Beltrán and Debora Ortega on the Our Stories, Our Medicine Archive (OSOMA) project to direct video production and aesthetic development of the archive. He is bridging the art/science divide by bringing different eyes to health, education, and social outcomes in Indigenous communities and is teaching  the OSOMA team how to use different lenses (literally and figuratively) to explore, excavate, and represent these issues.