Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Cyanotype painting, photography, installation, sculpture
Website: elainetnguyen.com
Elaine Nguyen is a Vietnamese American interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from UC Davis and a BFA in Painting and BA in Humanities from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Since completing graduate school she has remained rooted in the Bay Area, working out of a studio at Root Division, where she served as the 2024–25 Blau-Gold Teaching Fellow.
Nguyen’s practice has been supported by a growing list of residencies and fellowships, including a full fellowship at MASS MoCA (2025), the Foundation OBRAS residency in Portugal (2024), the Tropical Lab residency in Singapore (2023), and the World of Co residency in Bulgaria (2021). In 2024 she was named Best in Show at Axis Gallery’s 19th National Juried Exhibition and was a finalist for the Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellowship. Alongside her studio work, she is active as a curator and community builder, organizing projects such as Conversations in Identity — the first art exhibition held inside Salesforce Tower — and the published anthology Where the Flowers Bloom.
Nguyen has also worked extensively in arts education, serving as a Core Teaching Artist at Performing Arts Workshop and an instructor at Creativity Explored, both San Francisco organizations, in addition to her teaching fellowship at Root Division and assistantships at UC Davis.
Nguyen works primarily in cyanotype, a light-sensitive photographic printing process she applies to fabric, handmade paper, gauze, and porcelain to produce deep blue, atmospheric compositions. She has described the process as reminiscent of the sky and swimming pools — a way of stepping into an alternate, weightless reality. Her recent work centers on a recurring hazy, organic form she calls a “dreambug,” which she developed while processing a sudden, unexplained chronic illness that limited her mobility; the motif functions as a stand-in for the body’s transformation, regurgitation, and entrapment.
Across bodies of work, Nguyen returns to themes of identity, displacement, and the search for home, using the wandering blue tones of cyanotype to trace memory and the passage of time. She frequently combines the printed surface with sculptural elements — porcelain forms, grid-like structures, gauze layers — building installations that sit between painting, textile, and object.
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