Vietnam / USA

Khai Thu Nguyen is an award-winning bilingual filmmaker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Born in Vietnam, Khai immigrated with her family to the San Diego, California when she was 6 years old. Khai's short films Table Stakes about two African American comic book creators, and Alexa and May about her mom and the Amazon Alexa showed at numerous festivals including African Film Festival of New York (co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center), San Francisco DocFest, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Napa Valley Film Festival, Oakland International Film Festival, Viet Film Festival, and The Black Film Festival of New Orleans. Prior to films, Khai directed theater productions Romeo and Juliet in Saigon and Another Midsummer Night’s Dream in Ho Chi Minh City joining artists from Norway, US and Vietnam; and staged plays at Berkeley Art Museum, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz, and other galleries. Grants from Fulbright-Hays, UC Pacific Rim, and Royal Norwegian Embassy have supported her work. Khai’s writings on Vietnamese and American theater have appeared in multiple journals. She graduated from Stanford University and received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley, where she currently directs the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Research.

Filmography

Alexa and May (2018)
Table Stakes (2019)