Raised in California and Guatemala, R. Yun Matea* (리니 연) is an interdisciplinary and moving image artist based in Minneapolis on Dakota and Anishinaabe land. Engaging experimental cinematography and sound, staging, found footage and material objects, her practice investigates archival, historic and mythic conceptions of language, race, time, disease and ecology. Matea’s work is informed by a manifold worldview situated in her Korean-Guatemalan and rural heritage, early childhood in Guatemala during its civil war, many migrations, and life-long illness.
Matea has been awarded the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship; Jerome Foundation Film, Video and Digital Production Grant; McKnight Media Artist Fellowship; and MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. She was artist in residence at the Studios at Mass MoCA; Anderson Center at Tower View; and University of Minnesota Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. She earned her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and her BA in Geography from UC Berkeley. Matea has taught at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, University of California at Santa Cruz, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and Carleton College.
Her work is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center, Flaten Art Museum, and British Library. Screenings and exhibitions include: Center for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow); REDCAT Gallery, Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles); Galerija Nova (Zagreb); Souvenirs from Earth International TV Project (Cologne); Raum für Projektion (Bergen, Oslo & Buenos Aires); Katherine E. Nash Gallery (Minneapolis); Minnesota Museum of American Art, PAPA Projects, (Saint Paul); Flaten Art Museum, (Minnesota); Light Industry (Brooklyn); Mind TV/Media Independence, Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery Philadelphia Film Festival, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia); Wits School of the Arts (Johannesburg); Festival Images Contre Nature (Marseille); Berlinale Talent Campus Editing Studio (Berlin).
*formerly R Yun Keagy
Contact