Trịnh Thị Minh Hà

Trịnh Thị Minh Hà (1952, Hanoi) is a filmmaker, writer, literary theorist, composer and professor. She teaches in the University of California, Berkeley’s departments of Rhetoric, and Gender and Women’s Studies.

Born in Hanoi in 1952, Trịnh emigrated to the United States in 1970 where she studied musical composition, ethnomusicology and French literature, completing her PhD dissertation in 1977 under the title: Un Art sans Oeuvre: l’Anonymat dans les Arts Contemporains [An Art Without Oeuvre: Anonymity in Contemporary Arts]. Since the early 1980s she has developed a complex theoretical, visual and poetic response to the implicit politics regulating the production of discourses and images of cultural difference. Working through the multidimensional effects of imperialism and neo-colonial modernity, her works played a pivotal role in the emergence of postcolonial theory and critique. Her now canonical 1989 book, Woman, Native, Other, investigates the contradictory imperatives faced by an ‘I’ positioned ‘in difference’ as a ‘Third World woman’ in the act of writing, as well as in critiquing the roles of the creator, intellectual and anthropologist.

Trịnh has been making films for over thirty years and among her best known are Reassemblage (1982) and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1985). Alongside films and installations, she has published numerous essays and books on cinema, cultural politics, feminism and the arts.