Howard Henry Chen was born in Saigon, Viet Nam in 1972 and left for the United States with his family in 1975, a few weeks before the tanks rolled in. He grew up in Pennsylvania and studied journalism and political science at Boston University. He then worked as a journalist at several newspapers, covering, among other subjects, the television industry and the changing demographics of the American South. He first studied photography at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where he sharpened his interest in cultural hybridity and produced a project on second-generation Vietnamese in the American South. He won the first Fulbright fellowship given in photography to Viet Nam in 1999, and has spent the last six years shuttling back and forth doing photographic work. He will receive his MFA from Columbia College in 2006. His most recent exhibit was at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, where he and his wife currently live. Chen was an artist-in-residence at CPW in 2001.