RAVEN CHACON
B. 1977

Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer-Prize winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. Through musical and visual compositions, Chacon explores the complex interactions between people, space, and sound. His works are often site-specific, engaging the material and sonic qualities of a given place to make perceptible what has been historically silenced or left out of the frame: legacies of colonial conquest and extraction, Indigenous memory, cultural narratives, and acts of resistance.

Raven Chacon was born in 1977 in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works presented at Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover, Germany (2025); The Swiss Institute, New York (2024); The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2024); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2021); The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (2020); The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois (2020); SITE SANTA FE, New Mexico (2016); Borealis Festival, Bergen, Norway (2018); and Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (2014). As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Carnegie International 57 (2018), documenta 14 (2017), and The Whitney Biennial (2017), as well as the 2-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence (2015). A recording artist for over 25 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass.

Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). 

Chacon is the recipient of a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship; a Pew Fellow Artists Residency (2022); The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022); The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts’ Ree Kaneko Award (2021); The American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition (2018); United States Artists Fellowship in Music (2016); The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship (2014); and The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts (2012).

Chacon’s work is included in the public collections of Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; The Block Museum of Art, Chicago, IL; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Morgan Library, New York, NY; National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Tia Collection, and the Gochman Family Collection, among others.

C.V. (PDF)