Tran, T. Kim-Trang

          Tran, T. Kim-Trang was born in Vietnam and emigrated to the U.S. in 1975.  She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and has been producing experimental videos since the early 1990’s.  Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group screenings in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.  Tran’s Blindness Series, eight experimental video shorts investigating blindness and its metaphors, was completed in 2006. 

In 2010 Tran exhibited a three-channel video installation titled Landless in

Second Life, where she created an Afterlife for her mother as a way to explore notions of immigrants and immigration in the online, virtual world Second Life.

She produced a born-digital book of critical essays on The Blindness Series and completed a casual game titled Arizona 9about a girl’s murder that led to the demise of the border-watch movement in 2016.

Her latest project, Movements: Battles and Solidarity, a large-scale video installation on the shared movements in fashion, the Vietnam War and women in

the garment industry from 1972-74 debuted in 2020.

Tran is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Creative Capital grant, a Getty Mid-Career Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, which has enabled her to develop a screenplay based on the life of her mother titled Call Me Sugar, which she hopes to direct as a feature film project.

Tran holds the Suzanne D. Muchnic ‘62 and Paul D. Muchnic Endowed Professorship in Art and is a core faculty in Media Studies at Scripps College.