Trịnh T. Minh-hà (1952) is a Vietnamese-US-French filmmaker, music composer, and writer whose work has continuously interrogated ways of relating. She grew up in war-torn Vietnam before leaving the country to study music composition and French literature in the United States and France. This education enduringly shaped her artistic career, just like her direct experiences of colonialism, armed conflict, and displacement. Between 1977 and 1980, she conducted field research in Mali, Senegal, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) while teaching music analysis and theory in Dakar. There, she developed an interest in vernacular architecture and ethnographic cinema.
