Pao Houa Her: My Grandfather Turned into a Tiger... and Other Illusions

About the Author

Pao Houa Her (born in Laos, 1982) is a Hmong American artist and assistant professor in photography and moving images at the University of Minnesota. She holds an MFA in photography from the Yale University School of Art (2012) and a BFA in photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2009). Her’s work has been presented as a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 2022–23 and she was included as part of the Whitney Biennial in 2022. In 2023, Her was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is represented by the Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis.    Godfre Leung is an art critic and curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, in the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ First Nations. His writing has appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, C Magazine, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. At CAG, he has organized exhibitions by Dionne Lee, Sesemiya, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. In 2020, he curated PHH Emplotment at Or Gallery. Kong Pheng Pha is assistant professor of critical Hmong studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He is currently working on two books, including a forthcoming monograph tentatively titled Queer Refugeeism: Constructions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Hmong Diaspora.  Audrey Sands is an independent curator and photo historian. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a curatorial fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Henry Luce/ACLS Fellowship in American Art. From 2019 to 2022, she was the Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Tucson, Arizona, a joint appointment with the Phoenix Art Museum. Mai Der Vang is an author and poet. She is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Fresno State University.  Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer and the author of numerous books, including The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (2005), and Somewhere in the Unknown World (2020). She is also a recipient of the A. P. Anderson Award for her contributions to Minnesota’s cultural and artistic life, and a Soros, McKnight, and Guggenheim fellowship.