Biography
Artist Biography
Ilegvak is Peter Williams Yup’ik and preferred name. He is a culture bearer, artist, designer, filmmaker, writer, activist and educator originally from his family’s village of Akiaq (Akiak, Alaska), raised in Sheet'ká (Sitka, Alaska), currently nomadic and shares time between Dgheyay Kaq' (Anchorage, Alaska) and his ancestral homelands, Mamterilleq (Bethel, Alaska). His hand-sewn visual art repurposes skin from self-harvested traditional foods, bridging worlds of Indigenous art and subsistence. The deeply holistic nature of his Alaska Native culture informs his art and is why he creates it.
Ilegvak has completed artist residencies at Santa Fe Art Institute and Institute of American Indian Arts, and has guest lectured and/or taught skin sewing at Yale University, Stanford University, UCLA, Portland Art Museum, and Alaska State Museum, among others. His art has been shown at museums and galleries across North America.
His presentations at New York Fashion Week and Fashion Week Brooklyn in 2015 and 2016 led to profiles in The Guardian and The New York Times. He produced the documentary Harvest: Quyurciq, which received a Native Peoples Action project grant to create an accompanying curriculum for the film.
From 2018-2020, he became a Cultural Capital Fellow and Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellow. In 2021, he received an NDN Collective Radical Imagination Grant and, in 2022, a Forge Project Fellowship and United States Artists Fellowship. In 2023, he received the inaugural Inuit Art Foundation Fellowship for Alaska Native art writers. He is a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient. Ilegvak has contributed to First Alaskans Magazine, Alaska Humanities Forum and Inuit Art Quarterly, with articles covering various topics, including art, politics, Native rights and environmental justice. He is a member of the Indigenous Journalist Association. His work is increasingly focused on climate change and its disproportionate effects on Indigenous peoples and how Native cultural knowledge systems have solutions to this global crisis.
Headshot Photo by Shantre Pinkney