An-My Lê

2025 HDTS Fellow

Acclaimed New York–based photographer An-My Lê has been named the 2025 HDTS Fellow.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1960, Lê fled the country with her family in 1975 at the age of 15, resettling in the United States as a political refugee. Now based in Brooklyn, New York, Lê has developed a pioneering photographic practice that interrogates the role of landscape as both witness and participant in history. Her work has explored the lingering effects of war on both the natural environment and cultural narratives, creating bodies of work that redirect focus from the deeply personal to a distant view of history and time, while still embedding the immediacy and experience of the emotional contradictions of violence and awe.

As the 2025 HDTS Fellow—a year that marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon—Lê will return to the California desert, the site of her formative project 29 Palms (2003–2004), where she documented military training exercises staged in preparation for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

During her fellowship, Lê will build upon her recent Dark Star series, initiated in 2024 at Mesa Verde National Park to create new photographic works to be exhibited outdoors at A-Z West. Exhibition dates and public programming, including an artist talk co-presented with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, will be announced later this year. 

The HDTS Fellowship is an annual commission which provides one established artist per year the opportunity to spend extended time at A-Z West while working to realize an artwork or program that engages and enriches our High Desert community. The HDTS Fellowship Program is funded in part by generous support from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and Wilhelm Family Foundation.

An-My Lê was educated at Stanford University and at Yale University and has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Mac Arthur Foundation Fellowship (2012); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2009); and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997), amongst others. Lê is currently the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, New York.

In 2023, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized Between Two Rivers /Giữ a hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, a survey of Lê’s work, and in 2021 a major exhibition opened at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and travelled to the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI, and the Amon Carter Museum of Art, TX. Other solo exhibitions of Lê's work have been presented at the Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska (2017); Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015); Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland (2013); Dia: Beacon, New York (2008); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (2008); and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2002). 

Her work has also been included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017) and the Taipei Biennial (2014 and 2006). She has been included in numerous international group shows including at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota (2019); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016); National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2015); Tate Modern, London (2014); Brooklyn Museum (2012); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010) amongst others.

Fellowship Archive