Maya Nguyen (b.1996) is an artist with a focus on sound performance and diasporic making. Marked by migration from Hanoi, to Moscow, and now Chicago, her practice develops formal strategies to articulate experiences of lived ambiguity. Nguyen incorporates disparate (and often clashing) material sources into forms that remain conceptually indeterminate, such as performance lectures, sound improvisation, and participatory sculptural interventions. Her favored materials include: speech fragments, mistranslations, migratory routes, urban recordings, sounds imitating nature sounds, baby babble, breast pump parts, internet debris, and videos of daily life. Through these material interactions, she stages the indeterminacy of the relationship between mother/child, place of origin/migration, humans/non-humans.
Nguyen moves fluidly between galleries, festivals, sound venues, pop-up shows and universities, with recent/upcoming shows at Watershed Art & Ecology (Chicago), SoMad (New York), Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle), Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin), Saari Residency (Mynämäki, FI), Manzi Art Space (Hanoi), and recognition as Arts Club of Chicago Fellow 2025-26 and Karl Sczuka Radio Art Research Prize 2024 (SWR/Goethe Institute). She earned her BA in Philosophy/Comparative Literature from University of Chicago and MFA in Sound from School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Headshot credit: Magicfeifei (@magicfeifei)
Image: Maya Nguyen, Cage With The Sound Of Its Own Making, 2025, Participatory Installation, 10′ x 10′