Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Film, Writing, Music Composition, Installation
Website: trinhminh-ha.com
Born in 1952 in Hanoi, Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha (Vietnamese: Trịnh Thị Minh Hà) left Vietnam in 1970 to study in the United States, training in piano and music composition at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater in Saigon before pursuing graduate study abroad. She earned two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Literatures from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with studies spanning music composition, ethnomusicology, and French literature. Between 1977 and 1980 she conducted research and taught music theory at the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar, Senegal, an experience that shaped her engagement with vernacular architecture, oral tradition, and the ethics of cross-cultural representation.
Trinh joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1994, where she taught in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and, from 1997, the Department of Rhetoric. Since her retirement in 2020 she has held the title of Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School. Over the course of her career she also held teaching appointments at Cornell, Harvard, Smith College, San Francisco State University, and universities in Japan and Korea. Her scholarly and artistic practice is grounded in postcolonial and feminist theory, questioning totalizing systems of knowledge and challenging conventional categories of identity, representation, and cultural difference.
She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the California Arts Council. Her films have been honored in more than sixty retrospectives worldwide, and her work has been included in major international exhibitions including Documenta 11 (2002) and three editions of the Whitney Biennial (1987, 1993, 2022). She is married to the artist and architect Jean-Paul Bourdier, with whom she has collaborated on projects exploring dwelling and space across cultures.
Trinh T. Minh-ha works across film, writing, music composition, and installation, using each medium to interrogate the others. Her films — nine features made between 1982 and 2022 — move fluidly between documentary and fiction, essayistic narration and poetic image, refusing to assign fixed meanings to the footage they contain. Her debut, Reassemblage (1982), shot in Senegal on 16mm, established her signature approach: a montage of images and sounds that declines to explain, categorize, or speak “about” its subjects, offering instead a self-reflexive inquiry into the act of looking and listening. Subsequent films developed this method across Vietnamese diaspora identity, Chinese rural transformation, and Japanese cultural landscape, layering folk poetry, testimony, dance, printed text, and archival material into works that resist ethnographic resolution.
Her writing — which includes more than twelve books and over 150 articles — extends the same critique into theory, examining postcoloniality, feminist epistemology, immigration, and the politics of language. Her practice as a whole is animated by what she has called the “inappropriate/d other”: figures who exist at the threshold of categories rather than inside them. Her installations, often created in collaboration with Bourdier, translate this sensibility into spatial experience, working with color, sound, and image to create environments that refuse passive spectatorship.
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