H. Lan Thao Lam

H. Lan Thao Lam (b. 1968) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York. Examining the social memory of place, history, and architecture, their artistic practice spans research, object-making, installation, film, video, writing, and performance. Lam was a fellow with the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) from 2002 to 2003.

Since 2001, Lam has worked collaboratively with artist-filmmaker Lana Lin as the artist team Lin + Lam, developing mixed media research-based projects challenging how national historical narratives are constructed, translated, and mediated. From 1998, Lam began work on a solo piece titled Tracing Echoes (1998–2008), a mixed media installation examining the contested nature of memory through family members' recorded recollections of the 1968 Tet Offensive.

In 1999, Lam presented a solo show titled Wouldn’t Martha Be Proud! as an artist-in-residence at Side Street Projects in Santa Monica, California. Lam developed Where Does It Go From Here? in 2001, a project investigating the US military’s napalm bomb stockpile, a leftover from the Vietnam War.

Lam met the artist-filmmaker Lana Lin in 2000. The work documented how the former Pillar Point refugee camp in New Territories had been transformed into recreational sites for families after 2000.

In 2008, as part of a site-specific Lin + Lam commission by the Queens Museum for Corona Plaza: Center of Everywhere v.2, Lam drew upon their prior training as a hairstylist to offer free haircuts for the community of Corona, Queens throughout the summer. Creating a video work documenting interactions with the community, Unisex (2008) was presented both at the museum and at hair salons around the neighborhood.

While in Hong Kong in 2010, after reading about reunion tours where former refugees returned to visit their camps, Lam decided to visit their former refugee camp in Malaysia with Lin.

For their MacDowell Fellowship in 2017, Lam developed new sculptures for the Lin + Lam project Saxa Loquuntur, a mixed-media installation recreating antiquities collected by psychologist Sigmund Freud.

In 2019, Lam curated the exhibition Other Wise at the Gallery MC, New York, featuring artists siren eun young jung, Catalina Schliebener, Buzz Slutzky, and Trần Tín.

Lam worked with artist Sanne De Wilde in 2021 for the online project UN/MUTE-10002, which pairs New York-based artists with European artists to collaborate online, culminating in a series of video recordings.

Since 2015, Lam has taught at the Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, currently an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the School of Art, Media, and Technology. and they also previously taught at Cooper Union, New York, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Middle Tennessee State University.

Awards Lam was awarded the Media Art Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2005. Lam was a MacDowell Fellow in 2017. In 2020, they received a commission from KW Institute for Contemporary Art for Three Missing Letters (2021).