Born in Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer, and music composer. She spent her early years in Vietnam during a time of war, and in 1970, she relocated to pursue studies in the United States and France. Her diverse education encompassed musical composition, ethnomusicology, and francophone literature, deeply influenced by her personal encounters with colonialism, conflict, and displacement, which continue to inform her creative and intellectual work.
Minh-ha’s work includes nine feature-length films, including What About China?, 2021; Forgetting Vietnam, 2016; Night Passage, 2004; The Fourth Dimension, 2001; A Tale of Love, 1996; Shoot for the Contents, 1991; Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989; Naked Spaces, 1985; and Reassemblage, 1982. Her work has been honored in some sixty-nine retrospectives around the world; several large-scale multimedia installations, including In Transit (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020), L’Autre marche (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris 2006-2009), Old Land New Waters (3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China 2008, Okinawa Museum of Fine Arts 2007), The Desert is Watching (Kyoto Biennial, 2003); and numerous books, such as Lovecidal. Walking with The Disappeared (2016), D-Passage. The Digital Way (2013), Elsewhere, Within Here (2011), Cinema Interval (1999), and Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989).
Minh-ha’s latest film, What About China? has received the 2022 New:Vision Award at CPH:DOX Film Festival in Copenhagen, the 2022 Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Prix Bartók at the 2022 Jean Rouch Film festival, the Inspiration Award at Viet Film Fest, a Special Commendation at the BFI London Film Festival, and the Presidential Award at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Film Festival. Her many awards include the 2014 Wild Dreamer Lifetime Achievement Award at the Subversive Film Festival in Zagreb; the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art; the 2012 Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association; the 2006 Trailblazers Award at MIPDoc in Cannes, France; and the 1991 AFI National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award.
Trinh Minh-ha taught at the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar, Senegal (1977-80); at universities such as Cornell, San Francisco State, Smith, Harvard, Ochanomizu (Tokyo), Ritsumeikan (Kyoto), and Dongguk (Seoul); and is Distinguished Professor of The Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley.
Presented in partnership with Ann Arbor Film Festival and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan.
Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS, ALL ARTS, and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.