Nguyen Trinh Thi (b. 1973) is a Hanoi-based, American-educated independent filmmaker and video artist and is the founder and director of DOCLAB, an independent centre for documentary film and video art in Hanoi. Her work has been screened in institutions and festivals worldwide, including Fukuoka Asia Art Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, the Tate Modern in London and the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, to name a few. She also participated in the Singapore Biennale 2013 and Disrupted Choreographies at the Musée d’Art Contemporain Nîmes in 2014.

Nguyen Trinh Thi’s work examines the role of an artist in contemporary Vietnamese society and explores memory in order to uncover hidden, displaced or misinterpreted histories. In her latest film, Jo Ha Kyu (2012) the artist follows the essential concept of the narrative structure in Japanese temporal arts, jo ha kyu, and explores the filmmaker’s personal and subjective experience of Tokyo in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake, presenting a conflict and co-existence of concrete and abstract worlds, objective and subjective views, narrative and non-narrative, documentary and fiction. Her video installation, Unsubtitled, which she presented at the Singapore Biennale 2013 is an exploration of the role and position of the artist in contemporary Vietnamese society. Underlying themes include issues of censorship and freedom of artistic expression.