Pipo Nguyen-duy

Pipo Nguyen-duy was born Nguyen Duy Hieu in Hue, central Vietnam, in 1962. He grew up within about thirty kilometres of the demilitarized zone and said he heard gunfire every day as a child. He barely knew his mother as a child. His older brother lost his right arm while serving as a South Vietnamese soldier in Cambodia, which later shaped his art. As a teenager he was a national table tennis player for Vietnam. In 1975, days before the fall of Saigon, he was airlifted out and reached the United States aged 13 as a political refugee. He spoke no English and went to live with his mother in Monterey, California.

He earned a BA in economics from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1983. After a period in northern India studying meditation and living as a Buddhist monk, and years in New York, he studied photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, earning an MA in 1992 and an MFA in the mid-1990s (Wikipedia gives 1995 and Oberlin College gives 1996). He also took part in the American Photography Institute National Graduate Seminar at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

In 1980s New York he worked as a bartender and nightclub manager in the East Village, met Don Cherry and Keith Haring, modelled, and then quit work for a year to learn photography. At UNM he made staged self-portraits that inserted him into classical European art and Biblical stories, and the series A Thousand Deaths (1993), inspired by John Thomson's 19th-century photographs of Chinese prisoners. Later self-portraits in AnOther Western cast him as a gunslinger to probe race and stereotype with humour.

After teaching briefly in Oregon he joined Oberlin College in 1998, where he became Professor of Studio Art and Photography and chair of studio art. His series East of Eden (2002 to 2006) staged American landscapes after September 11. East of Eden: Vietnam (2005 to 2011) documented war amputees, and with a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship he continued in Vietnam, beginning (My) East of Eden in 2012 with rural schoolchildren in landscapes once destroyed by Agent Orange. Hotel Window recorded street life from a hotel room in Ho Chi Minh City, and AnOther Expedition was shown in Hanoi, Hue, Cleveland and New York.

Represented by ClampArt in New York, he had solo shows there in 2017, 2019 and 2025, showed (My) East of Eden at the 2023 Sharjah Biennial, and appeared in the 2023 Daegu Photo Biennale, the Minneapolis Institute of Art's 2019 Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, and the Ohio Arts Council's 2024 In Touch. He lectured at Fulbright University Vietnam, MATCA in Hanoi, Penland School of Craft and elsewhere.

Nguyen-duy lived in Oberlin, Ohio, and earlier in New Mexico, New York and Oregon. His child was born while he was in graduate school in New Mexico. He was married to Tran Thi Phong, who died with him in 2026. He travelled to Vietnam regularly from 2001. Former students said he made people feel seen.

His art centred on belonging, displacement and cultural identity, and he said he was often seen as an outsider in both Vietnam and the United States. He spent time as a Buddhist monk in his youth. In a 2021 Ideastream interview on equity in art he said photographs should be understood through who is making them and who is looking through the viewfinder.

Nguyen-duy taught photography at Oberlin for nearly three decades, and generations of students credit him with shaping their careers. His Vietnam photographs of war amputees reportedly led NGOs to distribute wheelchairs, and his images of children in regenerating landscapes are an important Vietnamese American look at the war's legacy. His work is in public collections in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the George Eastman House, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Light Work and the Nevada Museum of Art.

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in photography (2011). National Endowment for the Arts grant. En Foco grant. College Art Association Professional Development Grant. American Photography Institute National Graduate Fellowship. Oregon Arts Commission fellowship. B. Wade and Jane B. White Fellowship in the Humanities at Oberlin. Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships, a 2017 Award of Excellence and a 2021 grant. Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Artists at Giverny residency. Residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2001) and Light Work (2004). Vermont Studio Center Artist's Angel Award. Oberlin H.H. Powers travel grants (2011, 2013, 2016).

His work appeared in Stranger's Guide (2022), Internazionale (2023) and BOMB (2024), in the Nevada Museum of Art's Altered Landscape exhibition (2022), and was reviewed by Donald Kuspit in Artforum (2017). Takashi Aso wrote about his self-portraits in a 2014 essay. He was profiled by Ideastream in 2021 (Equity in Art: Photographing Home) and Lenscratch in 2021, and gave a Carleton College convocation address, A Dust of Life, in May 2024.

Nguyen-duy, 64, and his wife Tran Thi Phong, 56, were found dead with multiple gunshot wounds in their home on South Pleasant Street in Oberlin, Ohio, on the morning of October 28, 2026. Police had been called to a vehicle fire in an Oberlin College parking lot and then took the vehicle's owner into custody. That was his 31-year-old child from Ashland, Oregon, booked as Daniel Jones, who told the court they now use the name Asia Nguyen-Duy. Police and prosecutors charged the suspect with six counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault and one count of tampering with evidence; bond was set at $3 million and the case was bound over to a Lorain County grand jury. No plea had been entered and the accused is presumed innocent. Oberlin briefly sheltered in place. President Carmen Twillie Ambar announced his death to the campus, and Oberlin put his artwork on display in his memory. Funeral and burial details had not been made public.