In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. Hopinka’s video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms of media.

His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5 in 2021.  He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles, France. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow.  He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, and is a 2022 MacArther Fellow.

Hopinka currently teaches at Bard College in New York.