Trinh, T. Minh-Ha 1952-

Trinh T. Minh-ha (born 1952 in Hanoi; Vietnamese: Trịnh Thị Minh Hà) is a Vietnamese filmmaker, writer, literary theorist, composer, and professor. She has been making films since the 1980s and is best known for her films Reassemblage and Surname Viet Given Name Nam. She has received several awards and grants, including the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the California Arts Council. Her films have been the subject of twenty retrospectives. She is professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses that focus on gender politics as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory, and the arts. The seminars she offers focus on critical theory and research, cultural politics, feminist theory, Third Cinema, film theory and aesthetics, the Voice in social and creative contexts, and the autobiographical. Her Vietnamese heritage as well as years of her life spent in West Africa, Japan, and the United States have informed Trinh's work, particularly her focus on cultural politics. While she does not locate herself as primarily Asian or American she also situates herself within the "whole context of Asia whose cultural heritages cut across national borderlines."