In this episode of Undoxx: Artists Untangle Censorship, we explore how censorship functions in a country outside of the US, specifically for artists from Vietnam. Host maura nguyễn donohue is joined by a fellow curator for the project We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers Anh Vo, and Vietnamese performance artists Thanh Toàn Doan & Nhi Lê Phương. 

How do artists raised under strict censorship, scarce resources, and unstable infrastructures persist? Navigating both direct censorship—state oversight, permits, and surveillance—and indirect pressures such as funding loss and institutional control draws increasing parallels between Vietnam and the U.S. Building temporary, collective, and sometimes unsanctioned environments for performance —DIY structures like pop-ups, workshops, and street-based actions—becomes an essential strategy for survival and experimentation. Collective practice, improvisation, and mutual support are critical tools, but what is the mental cost of resilience?

This episode was recorded on Jan 30, 2026.

ABOUT THE GUEST HOST 
maura nguyễn donohue is a Vietnamese American artist and Chair of Dance at Hunter College. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Đoàn Thanh Toàn is a movement artist based in Ho Chi Minh City , Vietnam. Toan was trained in Contemporary Indian dance technique Yorchha with Ananya Dance Theater and African-based movement with Brown Spirit Ensemble. They also facilitate workshops that foster connections through movement and dance. As a performing artist, Toàn finds dance at the convergence of community, justice, and feminist queer world-making. 

Nhi Lê works in installation, performance art, and visual art. Based in Saigon, Vietnam, her work explores themes of human instinct, space and time via mixed mediums and familiar objects with potentially metaphorical meanings. Her practice focuses on evoking critical thinking towards one’s true self and redefining values that shape behaviours within the social system, exploring the role of human connection.

Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilizes the naked body in its variations to make explicit the entanglement of power and apparitional forces that cut across flesh. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental performance, Hanoi performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices.

CO-PRODUCER BIOS

Yanira Castro is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist and organizer working at the intersection of communal practice, performance, installation, and interactive technology. She forms iterative, multimodal projects activated and performed by the public as rehearsals for radical democracy. She is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. acanarytorsi.org.

maura nguyễn donohue (see bio above). 

Hope Mohr works at the intersection of the arts and social justice. www.movementlaw.net 

Ziggy Simone is a Black performer, choreographer and producer that develops works centering queerness, Black kinships, ancestral/emotional memory, and the absurd to imagine new worlds. 

zavé martohardjono is a trans and queer Indonesian-American-Canadian choreographer, performer, filmmaker, writer, and organizer who thinks about ecological activism and decolonization as technologies for liberation.

UNDOXX is an artist-run collective that organizes conversations, festivals, and interventions against censorship in the arts. They build power among those most often targeted by censorship: BIPOC artists, queer and trans and women artists, and global artists. 

RESOURCES 

For more information about performance in Vietnam please read the MRPJ issue #62 co-edited by maura, Anh and We Exist co-curator Lumi Tan at

https://movementresearch.org/publications/performance-journal/issue-62/

Learn more about UNDOXX and follow UNDOXX on Instagram for upcoming events.