Interview with Minh Tran (2015)
Files
Description
A dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Minh Tran immigrated to the United States in 1980 as a political refugee. His work has been performed throughout the western United States, at Dance Theatre Workshop in New York, and in Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Tran is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Dance at Reed College and a board member for White Bird, a contemporary dance presenting organization in Portland.
Recorded for the documentary Moving History: Portland Contemporary Dance Past and Present.
Interview Date
2015
Disciplines
Dance
Rights
This interview is made available through the Portland State University Library Special Collections and University Archives with the generous permission of Eric Nordstrom, Portland Performing Arts Video and is for educational and non-commercial use only. It cannot be reproduced in any form, distributed or played for commercial purposes. For more information, please contact Special Collections at Portland State University Library at: specialcollections@pdx.edu or (503) 725-9883
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/18803
Recommended Citation
Tran, Minh and Nordstrom, Eric, "Interview with Minh Tran (2015)" (2015). Interviews. 2.
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/18803
Biographical
Born in Vietnam, Minh Tran immigrated to the United States in 1980 as a political refugee. He received training in classical Vietnamese opera at the National School of Fine and Performing Arts in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), holds a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of Washington, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration / Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis from Portland State University with a Certificate in Dance.
Tran has created over forty choreographic works since 1989. As both a dancer and choreographer, his work has received numerous grants, fellowships and commissions from local, regional, and national organizations, including the Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Alaska Dance Theater, San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, UCLA’s Asian & Pacific Performance Exchange Initiative, and the Doris Duke Fund for Dance of the National Dance Project.
As an educator, Tran's research is specialized in Southeast Asian Dance & Culture and Dance Training Toward Performance. In 2008 he joined the faculty of Reed College, where he teaches intermediate and advanced technique and choreography, repertory, and Dance Traditions of Southeast Asian Civilization. He served as Reed's Dance Department Chair in 2013. Tran has also been a guest instructor at the University of Washington, Lewis & Clark College, University of Portland, Western Oregon University, University of Nevada Las Vegas, and University of Nevada Reno.
Since 1995 he has contributed nationally to the dance field at large. He has served as a review panelist for public and private funding organizations, curated Seattle’s On the Boards’ 12 Minutes Max series for the 1997-98 season, and served as Treasurer for the Dance Coalition of Oregon. He is currently an advisory committee member for New York's Dance Theater Workshop Suitcase Fund’s Task Force on Southeast Asia/Mekong Region. He is also an arts consultant for Dance Advance, an organization supporting dance culture in the Philadelphia area.
Tran’s work has been performed throughout the western United States, at Dance Theatre Workshop in New York, and in Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
Interviewer Eric Nordstrom is a dance performer, filmmaker and professor. As a director and editor, his interests focus on the intersection of dance, improvisation, documentary, and film. His past and current film work features such prominent dancers and scholars as Ann Cooper Albright and Simone Forti. In Seattle, he has performed with Karen Nelson, and in Portland, Oregon, was a core company member with Oslund+Company. Eric has taught contemporary technique, contact improvisation, and dance film courses in colleges and festivals throughout the U.S., including Macalester College, Kenyon College, Reed College, Portland State University, Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation, Conduit Dance, and The Ohio State University, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts. He is on faculty at Lewis and Clark College.