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Hannah Hanski (b.1985) is a Canadian neo-folk artist working in textile and digital media.
Raised by her Latvian grandmother and a Zenith television, Hanski was mesmerized by the
sharp contrast between the retelling of World War II family trauma and the saturated images of
American media that flooded through three local channels. This dissonant experience of
storytelling launched a lifetime obsession with popular forms of entertainment as remedy and
escape.
Convinced of the power of narrative, Hanski pursued her undergraduate in Folklore, graduating
with her B.A in 2009. In 2014 she formalized her art practice when she was admitted to
Carnegie Mellon University, where she worked to combine textile, video and interactive media.
She graduated with her MFA in 2017.
With her immense visual vocabulary of cartoon and pop culture imagery, Hanski has been
instrumental in the creation of renown digital applications such as Bitmoji and a pioneer in the
experimental video game world. She has gained a reputation for using the traditional craft of
rug hooking to digest a daily barrage of media, finding resonance with archetypal figures of the
collective unconscious. Her work has been shown at The Hammer Museum, The Art Gallery of
Ontario, The Textile Museum of Canada, The Long Beach Museum of Art, The San Jose Museum
of Quilts and Textiles, The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and The Rooms in St. John’s,
Newfoundland.