Pao Houa Her

Pao Houa Her is a Hmong American artist whose practice engages primarily with legacies and potentials of landscape, portraiture, and documentary photographic traditions and aesthetics, creating works that examine identity, longing, and belonging in Hmong diasporic communities.

Among Her’s solo exhibitions are 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). Her’s work was recently exhibited in the Whitney Biennial (2022). It has also been included in group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, the Milwaukee Art Museum, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, among many others. A prizewinner in the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (2022), Her was the recipient of the McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship (2022 and 2016) and the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2019). Notable institutional collections holding her work include the Singapore Art Museum and the Walker Art Center.

Her is an 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). Born in Laos in 1982, Her was raised in Minnesota and is based in Blaine, Minnesota.