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hamsa fae (b. 1993, Los Angeles) is a Vietnamese American artist working across expanded performance and moving-image installation. Her work has been presented across experimental and institutional spaces throughout San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego. She has delivered talks at the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Her writing has been published and featured in diaCritics, Transgender Law Center, and the Yale School of the Environment. She is the Founder and Director of the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship in Southern California, supporting the development and visibility of queer AAPI artists.
As an internet-native rooted in a decade of land-based animist practice, she positions the body as a site of re-matriation. Through durational bodily transformation and self-documentation, she observes how gendered bodies are consumed and mediated within economies of feminized labor and desire.
Emerging from the political and spiritual mundanity of trans womanhood, her work mobilizes the nude form as an ancestral and digital technology of return. From natural landscapes in the Californias to livestreaming platforms, her site-responsive performances activate environments as co-performers. Audiences are invited to kneel, speak, recline, or gather in collective ritual acts that confront the historical erasure of third gender peoples while collapsing the distinction between witness, voyeur, and co-author.
Her multimedia installations extend these performances into speculative altars and ecological afterlives. Combining organic materials and assembled GIFs, she constructs participatory interventions that destabilize binaries between nature and interface. Her work reveals how networked systems reshape intimacy while eroding embodied relationships to earth and one another.
AWARDS + RESIDENCIES
2026 Aurigin Center for Creatives Residency, Villalonga, Spain
2025 Visionary Artist Grant, Roze Umbra, Vancouver, Canada
2025 CE Artist & Creative Grant, Community Engagement, CA
2025 Pollinator Residency, Virtual/NY
2025 Loop Art Critique Residency, Mud Foundation, Virtual/FL
2025 Healing Through the Arts Grant, Prebys Foundation, CA
2024 AHL-AAPI Women Artist Fellowship, AHL Foundation, NY
2023 Trans Leadership Award, City of San Diego, CA
2022 Poetry Prize Shortlist, C&R Press
SOLO EXHIBITIONS (live performance*)
2026 NYMPHS, Mendocino Art Center, Mendocino, CA
BODY IS LAND, Cash Machine, Los Angeles, CA
INTERSPECIES, Telematic at Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, CA
2024 Trans Aphrodisia, Brown Building, San Diego, CA*
SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS (live performance*)
2026 Soft Portals, 120710 Gallery, Berkeley, CA
Computer Love, tiat, San Francisco, CA
2025 Mad World, The Wrong Biennale, Virtual/FL
Mad World, Mud Foundation at Miami Art Week, Loop Art Critique, Virtual/FL*
VISCERA: Vessel, Water and Power, Los Angeles, CA*
Queer Movement Festival, Disco Riot, San Diego, CA*
Feminism Is Not Your Enemy, AHL Foundation, New York, NY*
Nude Runway, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA*
2024 LIMINAL SPACE: What Has Been, What Could Be, Mingei Museum, San Diego, CA*
17th Annual Dia de la Mujer, Casa Familiar at The Front, San Ysidro, CA *
Through the Maze: yet another Birth Of, Athenaeum Art Center, San Diego, CA*
Material Intimacies, Project [Blank} at Bread & Salt, San Diego, CA*
2023 Queering the Table, Mingei Museum, San Diego, CA*
CURATORIAL
2026 EROTECH, A Reason to Survive Gallery, San Diego, CA (upcoming)
2025 PROPHESY: Joy Futurism In A World Renewing, The Front, San Ysidro, CA
the land we carry, El Salon at Casa Familiar, San Ysidro, CA
LECTURES + READINGS
Gönül (Heart/Soul), Creative Mornings, San Diego, CA (upcoming)
Transfemininity as Eco-Performance, Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA
Art for Hope, GSA Network, Virtual/Oakland, CA
SDPF24 Coda poetry festival, San Diego Poetry Futures at UC San Diego, San Diego, CA
LA Poetic Games -Paris Olympics Showcase, Los Angeles Central Library, Los Angeles, CA
Activism Now, CA Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative x Black Women for Wellness at Klik Studio, Los Angeles, CA
Asian & Asian American Poetry Jam, San Diego Asian Film Festival, San Diego, CA
SELECT PUBLICATIONS
Reverberation, Hi-Res Magazine (ed. Stacey Edelstein): “the land we carry”
the t4t project: Issue 3, the t4t project: “original sin”
Trầm Tích: Unearthed Memories (ed. Hà Trang), Vănguard Zine: “Machismo”
love letters for now (ed. Cat Gunn), Harvest and Gather: “Sun Dog”
No Ghosts, But Spirits: Volume V (ed.Emily Perkovich), Querencia Press: “Gynandromorphism”
Vănguard: Issue 6 (ed. Antonius-Tin Bui), Vănguard Zine: “Glucose Spike”
diaCRITICS (ed. Eric Nguyen), Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network: “Form 1040”
Fruitslice: Pride Edition (ed. Chloe Oloren), Fruitslice: “world wide web”
New Words: Issue Three (ed. Brooklyn Baggett), new words {press}: “Chosen Family”
SAGE Magazine 2024: Kinship (ed. Elisabeth Schreiber), Yale School of Environment: “Emergency Relief for Gaza”
SELECT FACILITATION
2025 Food as Ceremony, California Institute of Integral Studies, Mount Shasta, CA
2025 Healing Foods of Hawai’i, Hestia Magic, Big Island, HI
2025 Vocal Reclamation, Deep Play Institute, Virtual
2024 Vocal Reclamation, Tea at Shiloh, Los Angeles, CA
2023 Transgender Folk Herbalism and Advocacy, School of the Sacred Wild , Los Angeles, CA
2022 Plant Spirit Medicine Immersion, Elderflower Mystery School of Healing Arts & Justice, San Diego, CA
2021 Reiki & Energy Medicine Immersion, Elderflower Mystery School of Healing Arts & Justice, San Diego, CA
EDUCATION
BA, Art History, Criticism & Conservation, University of California, San Diego, California
Studio Art, Exchange at UC Center, Paris, France
Korean Art, Exchange at Kyunghee University, Seoul, South Korea
SELECT PRESS
Hindmon, Jade. “AANHPI Heritage Month: Creating Art with hamsa fae.” KPBS Midday Edition, 28 May 2026. Audio interview profiling artist, hamsa fae, discussing performance art, trans lineage, community-building, and the creative landscape for AANHPI artists in San Diego.
Deaderick, Lisa. “What Could You Create, Imagine, With No Boundaries?” The San Diego Union Tribune, 6 Dec. 2025. Article profiling artist, curator, and director of the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship, hamsa fae, and her work “GIRL VOICE” and curatorial project, “PROPHESY”
Varga, Dori. “Joy Is Chosen — Inside the Current with hamsa fae.” Blood of Aurora, 8 July 2025. Interview on creative orientation, daily embodiment, and somatic practices for living in bodily poetry.
Dixon Evans, Julia. “Performance Artists to Explore Ancestral Identity in San Diego Festival.” KPBS Midday Edition, 21 July 2025. Audio interview segment featuring hamsa fae discussing performance, lineage, and ancestral memory.
“Into Ethereality: Performance as Remembrance, Southern California Based Artist Hamsa Fae.” Li Tang Community, 30 Jan. 2025. Interview and feature article detailing artistic practice, themes of identity and ritual, exhibition history, and community work.
Combs, Seth. “Art of the City: City Heights Resident Explores Culture, Trauma Through Performance Art.” The San Diego Union-Tribune, 4 Feb. 2024. Feature on hamsa fae’s performance work “Homework” at the Mingei International Museum, exploring embodied inquiry into healing, audience dynamics, and physical vulnerability.