From an article by Eva Brank for ArtAsiaPacific:
Born in 1962 in Huế, central Vietnam, Nguyen-duy grew up amid the turbulence of the American war in Vietnam. Following the Fall of Saigon in 1975, he fled to the US as a political refugee. There, he earned a degree in economics from Carleton College, and moved to New York’s East Village in 1983, where he became involved in the local art scene, interacting with the likes of Keith Haring and Don Cherry. Subsequently, Nguyen-duy enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to pursue both an MA (1992) and MFA (1996) in photography. During his studies, he engaged with questions of diasporic identity, militarization of daily life, and postwar memory, which would later define his practice.