Van Tran Nguyen (she/her) is a Vietnamese American artist-scholar, practicing filmmaker, curator, and multimedia artist. In 2017, Tran Nguyen earned a master's degree in fine arts from the State University of New York, at Buffalo. Then in 2021, she earned her doctorate in the Philosophy of Electronic Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

Tran Nguyen’s monograph in progress, Playing With Myself: Repetition as Self Determination reexamines the tools of media-making as diasporic technologies, asserting that the advances and techne of storytelling are recuperated by Asian artists from weapons of subjectification to mediums of liberation. She wrote and co-directed two films: ERIE COUNTY SMILE (2021) available for public access via PBS and THE MOTHERLOAD (2024) which premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival with support from the Vilcek Foundation’s New American Perspectives. THE MOTHERLOAD is available to watch on Apple TV, Prime TV, and Tubi.

In the fall of 2021, she was appointed the Maya Brin Institute for New Performance and Technology Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is an alumni of the Early Career Fellowship at the UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice (2024-2025). In the fall of 2024, she joined the Department of Performing Arts at Georgetown University as the Assistant Professor of Performance and Film & Media Studies.