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Heidi Kumao is an award-winning visual artist and filmmaker who creates animations, fabric works, video installations, photographs, and machine art that explore the psychological and emotional underside of everyday interactions. Her interests have manifested a wide range of hybrid art forms including: electromechanical girl’s legs that “misbehave,” video installations about surviving confinement, experimental films and stop motion puppet animations, cinema machines, stitched fabric drawings, a game interface which empowers users to hack live CNN broadcasts, and provocative electronic clothing.
Many of her works feature a minimalist theater set, a site for presenting simple actions such as writing, gardening, reading, or walking in order to call attention to these often overlooked acts. Through these animated tableaus, she demonstrates how small gestures, even the most private and poetic, can become significant acts of defiance.
Kumao has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, AAUW (American Assn. of University Women), the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Puffin Foundation.
She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including one-person exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Arizona State University Art Museum, and Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco. Group exhibition venues include: ArtScience Museum (Singapore), San Jose Museum of Art (California), Museo Universtario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, Wing Luke Asian Art Museum (Seattle), and the National Academy Museum in New York City. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, ArtPapers, and Sculpture Magazine and is in a number of private and public collections including The Exploratorium, Houston Museum of Fine Arts and Light Work (Syracuse, NY).
Her film, “Swallowed Whole,” about breaking her back, screened in over 25 film international film festivals including: the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Tricky Women International Animation Film Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival, Filmfest Dresden: International Short Film Festival and Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was awarded “Best Experimental Film” at the Female Eye and Big Muddy Film Festivals, Seoul International Extremely Short Film Festival, and Humboldt International Film Festival.
The illustrated catalog, “Heidi Kumao: Real and Imagined” (2022), documents her solo exhibition of narrative fabric works and animations and received a Gold Award from the Midwest Book Awards and a Silver Award from the Nautilus Book Awards. It can be purchased online.
She is a Professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
