Chris Eyre
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Chris Eyre received the Creative Capital Award in 2024. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Chris graduated from the University of Arizona and also the NYU Tisch graduate film program. Chris gained national attention in 1998 with his first film, Smoke Signals, which won the Audience Award and Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival and became the first nationally distributed feature film that was directed, written, co-produced, and featured American Indian actors. People Magazine called him “the preeminent Native American filmmaker of his time.” Chris later directed Skins, Skinwalkers, Edge of America, and Hideaway as well as television episodes of Law and Order, Friday Night Lights. He is Executive Producer and director of the AMC series Dark Winds that recently wrapped its second season.
The Land Acknowledgement Streaming Experience (L.A.S.E.)
Chris Eyre is a director, producer, and showrunner based in Santa Fe, NM.
Artist BioThe Land Acknowledgement Streaming Experience (L.A.S.E.) shines a unique light on America by looking at the country the way we look at it ourselves—through the window of a moving vehicle—revealing deeper truths that are sometimes paved over. Through a 100 hour continuous video stream of a journey around the outermost roads of the lower 48, viewers will see truck stops and diners and railroad crossings and the endless roadways that connect the towns and hamlets and cities. L.A.S.E. seeks to bring a Native American perspective through these roadways. As L.A.S.E. travel from state to state, they’ll educate viewers on the traditional homelands of Native America through specifically naming each Native American community, landscape, and territory, and their stories as they ride along, looking at the landscape from a car’s window. L.A.S.E. will see the landscapes as they first enter the “Iroquois Federation Territory,” and will ask along U.S. Route 1 in Maine, “Is this the Passamaquoddy stretch of the Great Trail?” L.A.S.E. turns the meditative time spent behind the wheel watching the unspooling landscape into a journey of self-reflection and Native American education, providing the American open road, adding the grammar and knowledge of Indigenous place and giving viewers the time and space to craft their own American essays. L.A.S.E. will resonate with many groups of Americans, young and old, wanting to escape through the meditative rhythms of the open road.