People

Maya Nguyen

MN is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist. Her practice engages power relations and the environments that facilitate them, focusing on the domestic sphere, colonial histories, migratory routes, and the relating between the human and the natural world.

She works with open-ended interactions — be it through listeners determining their own compositions by walking through a spatialized sound installation, bodies affecting one another through contact improvisation and performance, or essay film slipping between image, text, and sound. Common to MN’s various works is an openness of categorisation, where sound can be at once amplitude and power, pitch and gender, timbre and emotion.

MN holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, and an M.F.A in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown at Vincom Center for Contemporary Art, UCLA New Wight Gallery, Gene Siskel Film Center, Internationales Digitalkunst Festival 2022, Terrain Biennial 2021, Elastic Arts, Northwestern University, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and elsewhere.