Nina Tran is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer born in Vietnam and based out of Oakland, California. Her distinctive visual language takes a dynamic approach to storytelling through a range of mediums including fashion design, fiber arts, textiles, mixed media, and experimental animation.

Her practice centers around themes of labor, healing, cultural resistance, international solidarity, and liberation. Drawing from personal and collective histories through archival research and intergenerational storytelling, she explores identity, memory, and resistance rooted in the Vietnamese diaspora. As an artist, Nina believes in the responsibility to use our cultural tools to build the movement for collective liberation, tapping into creativity as a powerful part of revolutionary praxis.

Nina specializes in fiber and textile arts ranging from crochet, knit, weaving, and quilting as acts of political subversion and coded communication. The slow and intentional nature of fiber arts resists industrial capitalism by exposing the violence of a culture driven by consumerism and obscuring of labor. This informs her selection of materials, repurposing of textiles, and use of natural fibers, found objects, and unconventional materials to build worlds that feel intimate yet expansive. By transforming discarded items into purposeful creations, her materials are restructured to refuse disposability.

In a culture where our communication and media is being censored, Nina uses animation to deviate from hegemonic forms of information sharing. By disseminating information in digestible and accessible ways, her work empowers viewers to act. She merges craft, print, and texture to reimagine the relationship between image, meaning, and motion in each frame. Embracing handcrafted modes of production, her work is both a call to action and an invitation to see the world differently by bringing these imaginings to fruition with our bare hands, language, and words. 

In Syracuse, New York, Nina served as a co-education director for a student organization dedicated to ensuring fiber arts is accessible to everyone and rooted in community. She coordinated and led workshops for various skill levels. She also led consecutive fiber arts workshops for refugee and immigrant youth and adults at the Syracuse Northside Learning Center. Through accessible education, Nina uses fiber arts as a means to build community, transcending language, abilities, and borders.

Nina graduated from Syracuse University, with a B.A. in Sociology and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. In addition to her creative endeavors, Nina was awarded the Diane Lyden Murphy Bread and Roses Award for Activism on Behalf of Women, Trans, and Nonconforming People for her work with Students for International Labor Solidarity.