iris yirei hu (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, working in painting, installation, intercultural collaborations, writing, and public art. Her work focuses on material and spiritual transformation through labor-intensive pieces that explore grief, life cycles, the earthly and otherworldly, and self-evolution. She learns from various territories and peoples to investigate how geography, kinship, and the sacred manifest in cultural and ecological practices. Her work intimately probes the sentience in the natural world and the vulnerability in human connection across cultural, geographic, and generational differences, through which she creates fluid and relational ways to understand oneself and others.
In 2022, LA Metro commissioned hu to design a large-scale mosaic artwork for the future UCLA/Westwood Purple Line Metro Station slated to open for the 2028 Summer Olympics. She has exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA); Center for Arts, Research, and Alliances (New York, NY); Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ); Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art (Winnipeg, MB, Canada); John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; among many other venues. Public art commissions include California State University, Dominguez Hills and We Rise/Art Rise produced by the Institute for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA-LA) and Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), among others.
Most recently she was awarded the 2025 Longenecker-Roth Artist-in-Residence at UC San Diego and the 2025 John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry Artist-in-Residence in Pottery. In 2026, she and her lifelong collaborator, Paula Wilson, were selected as the Ruffin Distinguished Artists-in-Residence at the University of Virginia’s Department of Art. She has completed residencies at Surf Point Foundation (York, ME), Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA), Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), among many others. She is one of meztli projects’ inaugural 2024-25 Cultural Worker Fellows, a program focused on supporting the work of Native and Indigenous artists, culture bearers, and Elders, and was awarded the Fellowship for Visual Artists from the California Community Foundation (2022) and the California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (2021). hu has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2018 & 2020) and has also been nominated for the United States Artists Fellowship (2024).
hu’s writing has been published by the internationally recognized interdisciplinary journal in Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, Amerasia Journal, and her art work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, CARLA, Hyperallergic, and many other publications. hu holds an MFA in Visual arts from Columbia University, New York, NY and a BA in art from the University of California Los Angeles.
