Nida Sinnokrot is a filmmaker and installation artist whose work is reflective of his “hybrid identity” and personal experience. Of Palestinian origin, Sinnokrot grew up in Algeria and moved to the United States as a teenager. His films, installations, and sculptures explore the traumas generated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Palestinian Blues, his first film, has won numerous awards in international film festivals. His work has been included in various exhibitions including: “Never Part,” at the Bozar Museum in Brussels, Belgium; the “Jerusalem show,” Jerusalem; “When Artists Say We,” in New York; “American Visions and Re-Visions” at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Austria. He also participated at the 9th Sharjah Biennale, United Arab Emirates in 2009.
Sinnokrot earned a BS from the University of Texas – Austin in Film and an MFA from Bard College. While at Bard, he took apart his filmmaking equipment and turned the cinema into an interactive installation space, which he called Horizontal Loops. “A cinematic Theramin of sorts,” he describes, “where viewers are given agency over what they see, effectively re-socializing the traditional cinematic experience and foregrounding the question of who is in control of the media. Art allowed me to take control of the mechanisms with which my story was told.”
Sinnokrot was part of the Whitney Independent Studio Program, the Made in Palestine exhibit, and a number of group shows in the US and abroad. In 2002, he was awarded a Rockefeller Media Fellowship with which he went to Palestine to make a Horizontal Loop installation.
Sinnokrot will be teaching two courses in the spring 2018 semester:
4.354/5 – Introduction to Video and Related Media
4.352/3 – Advanced Video and Related Media