Cannupa Hanska Luger Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a Native American award-winning interdisciplinary artist, cultural innovator, and author. His creative and philosophical practice works to introduce new ideas, methodologies, and speculative technologies that are able to reflect Indigenous innovation and are able to help shift collective thinking.

He was born in 1979 and is based out of New Mexico. Cannupa enjoys creating community-oriented art that addresses such topics as environmental justice, gender violence, and indigenous peoples. He is an enrolled citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation. He is of Lakota, Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, Austrian, and Norwegian heritage.

The author was born in Fort Yates, North Dakota, where he grew up on the Standing Rock Reservation. Once his parents Kathy and Robert divorced, he moved to Phoenix, Arizona with his mom and five siblings. There his artist mother looked for a market for carved stone sculptures. He would spend summers on the ranch with his father on the Standing Rock Reservation. He gives his ancestors and his mother the credit for giving him the confidence to go after a living as an artist and in developing his own creative personal voice.

He attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and graduated in 2011 with his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in studio arts. His social sculptures, large-scale installations, and performances utilize sound, video and different sculptural materials to engage in political activism to tell stories about being indigenous in the 21st century. His work has been shown in a variety of places, such as the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and many more. The Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, which bestowed upon him the Burke Prize.

His installation Every One has been shown in many different museums as well. It is made up of four thousand individually hand-made ceramic beads that have been collected from Native and other different communities in the U.S. and Canada. They make up a portrait of various missing and murdered indigenous women, girls, and LGTQIA+ victims of gender violence. Luger says that the process was very collaborative, stating that it took ‘hundreds of people’ to make it.

The artist has also gone on to do solo exhibitions, such as his 2013 show at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and his 2016 show at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, as well as his 2019 solo show at the Gardiner Museum (‘Every One’). Luger is also frequently recognized for his Mirror Shield Project at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016, where he designed and made a hundred masonite and mirrored-vinyl shields, posting a video of the process on social media.

Luger was also responsible for organizing the Lazy Stitch exhibition at the Ent Center for Contemporary Art in 2018. In 2019, his work A Frayed Knot/Afraid Not was presented along with his solo exhibition Future Ancestral Technologies, which were put on at the Emerson College Media Art Gallery. His work was presented in 2019 in a Larger than Memory: Contemporary Art from Indigenous North America, and in 2020 he co-directed and designed costumes for the opera Sweet Land, which was put on at the Los Angeles State Historical Park and received the Musics Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera for 2020.

He put on his solo exhibition in 2021 in New York called New Myth, and presented his installation Something to Hold Onto. His exhibit Dripping Earth: Cannupa Hanska Luger premiered at the Joslyn Art Museum from November 2025-March 2026. He was also part of the Humble Art Collective in Santa Fe while at the Institute of American Indian Arts, later collaborating with Winter Count, Postcommodity, and R.I.S.E.

Luger has received a variety of awards for his work. The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts awarded him a Multicultural Fellowship Award in 2015. In 2018, he was given the Burke Prize and then received a National Artist Fellowship in 2016 from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. He also received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and was a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Honoree in 2019.

In 2020, he was given a Creative Capital Award artist fellowship from the Craft Research Fund and also received A Blade of Grass Foundation Fellowship. He was also given an Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian in 2020 and in 2022 was given the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. In 2025, he was the recipient of the National Geographic Wayfinder Award.

Luger has also been profiled in The New York Times Magazine and Art21 and has been featured on National Geographic magazine’s cover. He has also received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Maine College of Art & Design. He also received the New Mexico Governors Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Ourworlds Immersive Visual Arts Award, and the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship.

Luger has been given the 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and is a 2024 Monument Lab Fellow. He is also a Soros Arts Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a United States Artist Fellow. He was a 2021 Grist Changemaker. He was also a Creative Capital Fellow and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Today he has a studio practice located in Glorieta, New Mexico.

SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide is part book and part graphic novel by Cannupa Hanska Luger, contributed to by Eden Pearlstein and Cem Eskinazi. This is a work of Indigenous futurism that readers won’t want to miss!

Ever since 2015, multimedia artist Cannupa Hanska Luger has been putting together a new myth through a polymathic variety of forms such as film, poetry, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, and regalia. Referred to as Future Ancestral Technologies, this is a series of interrelated works that wants to re-imagine Indigenous life and culture taking place in a post-colonial world where space exploration has reduced as well as reconfigured the population of the Earth.

Creative, insightful, and impressive, this Future Ancestral Field Guide gives to the readers a view that is multi-dimensional that sees into Luger’s artistic universe. What would be a military survival guide from the seventies is now transformed through iterative line drawing, speculative fiction, and poetic redaction to disrupt the colonial subconscious that runs through the suppressed histories of the source text. Check out this meditation of planetary life that is being transformed by getting a copy of SURVIVA for yourself!