Pao Houa Her

August 2019

Pao Houa Her employs portraiture and still life to create provocative photographs of the indigenous Hmong people of Laos, who immigrated to the US after the Vietnam War. Highly personal, Her’s images extend the narrative of her own 1980 birth in Laos and her family’s flight from that country when she was three. She also sensitively documents the ethnic Hmong culture that took root across the US in the late 1970s and 1980s. Her received a BFA in Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2009) and an MFA in Photography from the Yale University School of Art (2012). She has received a McKnight Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship (2016–2017), a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2013), an Alice Kimball Fellowship (2012), and the Minnesota State Arts Board awarded her three Initiative Grants (2009, 2012, and 2018). She lives in Blaine, MN, a suburb of the Twin Cities.

www.paohouaher.com