Sonya Imin is a mixed Uyghur American multi-disciplinary creative and reluctant scholar. Her work spans the mediums of the moving image, performance, and the written word. Having grown up between the borderlands of the Uyghur homeland, broader Central Asia, and the midwestern United States, interrogations of belonging, home, and displacement influence the nature of her work. She has been particularly interested in the somatic residuals of memory, delineations of (dis)embodied identities, and excavations of collective unconsciousness through ancestral landscapes.
Currently based at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, her academic work explores how transformations in Uyghur exile are being negotiated through visual art and contemporary creative culture. She focuses on how diasporic identities are being articulated, how cultural shifts are being heightened by the realities of exile and genocide, and what narratives are being addressed through Uyghur creative arts. By looking at the dialogues around Uyghur art practices in diaspora, her work hopes to explore specific shifts of perception and experience, areas of alignment and integration, strategies of resistance and (non)disclosure.
Sonya is also one the editors of Under the Mulberry Tree, a multi-lingual anthology series of Uyghur art, poetry, and prose. She has worked on various art and film projects spanning across the United States, Europe, and Central Asia, and her debut documentary film, I AM HERE / مەن بار, was released in 2024.
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