Brian Doan

Photographer

Brian Doan received his master’s degree in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado at Denver. He is currently teaching photography at the Art Institute of California in Los Angeles. Doan’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Photography in Riverside, Calif., the International Center of Photography in New York, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, Mexico, the Victoria & Albert Museums in London, the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum, and the Milan Triennale.

He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including that from the California Council for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Fellows in the Humanities. His monograph The Forgotten Ones was published by the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA) in 2004. Web site: www.briandoan.com

“Having grown up in a conservative Vietnamese society and sustained by the consequence of the Viet Nam War, my life-long fantasy has been to live in a world of free self-expression and unlimited imagination. Many of my pictures come from personal combined with fictional experiences: both real and dream simultaneously hovering in the same moment. While each image appears telling a different diasporic story of the Vietnamese people, it actually reveals a sense of my own self-portrait.”

Wait, 2006 - fom "The Dreamland Series"

V&V, 2007 - from "The Dreamland Series"

Motel Alameda, 2007 - from "The Dreamland Series"

Freedom Fighter, 2007 - from "The Dreamland Series"

Sunken Boat, Palawan, 2004 - from "The Forgotten Ones"