Pao Houa Her

Pao Houa Her was born somewhere in the northern jungles of Laos in 1982. She fled Laos with her family when she was a baby, crossed the Mekong River on her mother’s back, was fed opium to be kept from crying, lived in the refugee camps in Thailand, and landed in America on a silver metal bird in the mid-1980s. She is a visual artist in Minnesota who works within multiple genres of photography.

Pao Houa Her was raised in Minnesota and is now based in Blaine, 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). She is currently assistant professor in photography and moving images at the University Minnesota.

Her was the recipient of the McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship (2022 and 2016) and the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2019). In 2022, she was a prizewinner in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery, named Minnesota Artist of the Year, and awarded Aperture’s Next Step Award. Last year, she was awarded a Tiffany Foundation Grant and named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Her’s work was included in the Whitney Biennial (2022) and recent group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; the Milwaukee Art Museum; MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts among others. Her’s solo projects include My father turned into a tiger… and other illusions at the Camera Club of New York (2024); Paj quam ntuj / Flowers of the Sky at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2022–2023); Emplotment at Or Gallery in Vancouver, Canada (2020); and My grandfather turned into a tiger at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis (2018). The first monograph of Her’s work was published by Aperture in 2024.