Pao Houa Her

Pao Houa Her’s artwork is rooted in stories of migration, desire, and belonging. Through photography, video, and site-specific installation, Her stays attentive to the shifting nature of memory, multi-directional time, and simultaneous truths related to HMong intergenerational and transnational experiences. With trickster intention, she addresses colonial histories and aesthetics to rescript authenticity and representation.

Pao Houa Her’s recent solo presentations include the institutional survey The Imaginative Landscape, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, and San José Museum of Art, CA (2025–26); The Modern Window: Pao Houa Her, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (2024–25); Nim ye, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis (2024); and Paj quam ntuj / Flowers of the Sky, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2022–23). Upcoming and recent group exhibitions include After the Monsoon: Art & War in Southeast Asia, National Gallery Singapore (2026); Spirit House, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, CA, and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2024–26); Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions, KADIST, San Francisco, CA (2024–25); The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2022); and Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It’s Kept, NYC (2022). Her work is collected by KADIST, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MAIIAM, National Gallery of Art, Singapore Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.  

Her’s work is the subject of two books, including Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape, Inventory Press (2026), and My grandfather turned into a tiger…and other illusions, Aperture (2024). She is the recipient of the John R. Solomon Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), winner of the Aperture Next Step Award (2023), prizewinner in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (2022), and a McKnight Visual Artist Fellow (2022, 2016). An assistant professor in Photography and Moving Images at the University of Minnesota, Her 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). Born in Laos in 1982, Her was raised and lives in Minnesota.

www.paohher.com