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 for over thirty years and may be best known for her films Reassemblage, made in 1982, and Surname Viet Given Name Nam, made in 1985. She has received several awards and grants, including the American Film Institute's National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award, and Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Her films have been the subject of twenty retrospectives. She is currently 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 "this whole context of Asia whose cultural heritages cut across national borderlines." The conceptualization of cultural heritages that transgress borderlines is one that continues to inform her work as both a filmmaker and a literary theorist.