Pipo Nguyen-duy competed as a national table tennis player in Vietnam as a teenager, spent part of the mid-1980s living as a Buddhist monk in northern India, and tended bar and later managed a nightclub in Manhattan's East Village, all before he ever picked up a camera. He died on October 28, 2026, in Oberlin, Ohio, at 64. For nearly three decades he taught photography at Oberlin College, where he chaired the studio art department, and the photographs he made on his own time, built around questions of exile and home, earned him a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a place in museum collections on four continents.

Nguyen-duy was born in Hue, in central Vietnam, close enough to the demilitarized zone at the 17th parallel that gunfire was a regular sound of his early years. In 1975, days before the fall of Saigon, he left the country as a political refugee. Nothing in the decade that followed pointed toward photography: the table tennis team, the monastery in India, the shifts behind a bar. It was in the East Village scene of the 1980s, what he later called "the crux of creativity in New York," where he met the musician Don Cherry and the artist Keith Haring, that his interests turned toward art, according to Oberlin College's own account of his life. He did not take up a camera until his late twenties, when a friend gave him one, the Oberlin Review reported.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Carleton College in 1983, then turned to photography in graduate school at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, completing a Master of Arts there in 1992 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1996. Oberlin hired him as a photography professor in 1998, and he taught there for the rest of his career, eventually chairing the studio art department.

The work he produced over the next two decades returned again and again to one question, which he put plainly in a 2019 interview with the Vietnamese photography magazine Matca: "what is home and where do I see myself as someone who was born in Vietnam and grew up in the U.S." His fullest answer was East of Eden, a project he began in 2003 and carried out in three chapters over ten years. The first chapter restaged his own wartime childhood for an American audience living through the anxieties of the years after September 11. The second sent him back to Vietnam, where he photographed war amputees posed in fields that had been replanted after decades of wartime defoliation. "The idea was translated by having people with physical wounds, war amputees, posing in the beautiful fields that were regenerated," he told Matca. The Guggenheim Fellowship he won in 2011, one of 180 awarded that year by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, funded much of that fieldwork, covering his airfare, lodging, and film stock on repeated trips back to Vietnam, the Oberlin Review reported.

The third chapter took him to a village in Ben Tre province, where he spent several summers photographing local children in landscapes he described as a reborn Eden grown out of ground once poisoned by Agent Orange. Some of the children worked with him across multiple summers, paid for their time, the money set aside for their education. "If they couldn't come to the set for whatever reason, they got really upset and cried," he told Matca, describing how the project became, in his words, "something ritual for all of us to gather, to talk about these images, and to play."

Nguyen-duy kept working past East of Eden. He showed a self-portrait series called AnOther Expedition in Hanoi and Hue in 2015 and at ClampArt in New York in 2017. He also returned to AsSimulation, a body of staged self-portraits he had made between 1995 and 1998 as a graduate student, restaging Renaissance and Baroque paintings in the dress of Asian theater; a show of that earlier work opened at CLAMP gallery in New York in September 2025. His photographs went into the collections of the George Eastman House, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others, and were exhibited at the Daegu Photo Biennale in South Korea and the Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia, according to his own exhibition record.

He described his classroom as inseparable from his studio practice. "To me, teaching and working are so intertwined that I cannot take them apart," he told Matca. "Teaching pushes me to make work and further myself in my intellectual and creative process." Students who passed through his photography program at Oberlin said that commitment showed. "I felt he was incredibly creative and an incredible photographer," Finn Sipes, an Oberlin College graduate, said after his death. Mayim Richman, an Oberlin senior who studied under him, called him "beloved by everybody here" and said simply, "He was just my professor and friend and such a great mentor."

Nguyen-duy's photographs remain in those museum collections, available to anyone who walks into the George Eastman House or the Nevada Museum of Art. Twenty-eight years of Oberlin students passed through his darkroom and his critiques, learning to build a body of work the way he had taught himself to build one: slowly, in chapters, returning to the same unresolved question from a new angle each time. The children he photographed across those Ben Tre summers grew up inside his pictures, and East of Eden, the ten-year project he carried from a staged American landscape back to the fields and villages of his own childhood, stands as the clearest record of a man who spent his life trying to answer where, exactly, he belonged.