Ha, born in 1981 in Hanoi, was the enrollment director of the Master of Finance Program (2009-2020), Exhibition Director of IE University (Spain), a member of the jury board of the IE Foundation Award at IE Humanities University in 2016-2020.

Her photos have been published in 130 journals and newspapers all over the world, including Vogue Italia, Vogue Talents and Vanity Fair France, and auctioned by Christie's Hong Kong for charity. Artprice, the world’s leading company in information about arts markets, has Ha on the list of global artists.

In 2019, Ha was nominated by the Vietnamese Embassy in Spain and Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as one of 200 Vietnamese people with global influences.

The woman who doesn’t follow the crowd

Ha has loved art since her childhood. However, as a third prize winner at the national competition for excellent students in English, she decided to study English at the Hanoi University of Education.

Like her friends, she decided to study abroad after graduation, but unlike them, she studied in Japan instead of the UK, US or Australia. Obtaining a full scholarship from Ritsumeikan APU, she left for Japan to study business administration. 

Not many students could find jobs in Japan, but Ha did. She worked for a company in Tokyo when she was a third-year student. After graduation, she worked in the central area of Tokyo for two years and took an extra job as a freelancer in market analysis for a Singapore-based firm.

Six years later, she decided to return to Vietnam and worked at the Japanese Mizuho Bank in Hanoi with the salary equal to the pay of Japanese officers.

Later, she wanted to study further and left Vietnam again to study for a master's degree in marketing administration at IE University, becoming the first student with Vietnamese nationality at the IE business school. In 2009, she became the enrollment director of the Master of Finance Program and was on the post for 11 years.

Becoming a professional artist

He said she followed the path to become a photographer by chance.

“During my first years at IE, I sometimes performed belly dance at the events of the school and worked to earn my living at Arabic bars. Then I met a Colombian photographer, who asked me to work as a photo model for her dance project, because there were very few Asian people in Spain,” Ha recalled.

After a while, Ha became interested in photography. She decided to buy a camera and practice taking photos for many other models.

“During the time of working as a photo model, I got to know a lot of stylists, designers, makeup artists and models and I contacted them. Within the first three years, the total number of individuals I cooperated with for the project implementation was nearly 500,” Ha said.

Since 2014, or just one year after she began shooting, her photography works have appeared in many photography and art journals, and then at galleries and auction houses in Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Tel Aviv and other cities.

Ha was invited by Vogue Italia to work for Vogue Talents Shooting. Recently, Louis Vuitton France has ordered a picture on the occasion of the store opening.

In 2020, she decided to spend all her time working as a professional artist. At present, she both creates artistic photography products and abstract painting, though most of her time is spent on photography. She also spends time creating NFT (non-fungible tokens) products based on her photography works.

Her products can be found in personal and collective collections in 30 countries.

In the past year, her works have been displayed at various exhibitions in New York, Milan, Tokyo, including an exhibition with 30 works on women at Count Medinaceli's Palace in Spain.

After two years of Covid-19 pandemic, Ha said her top priority now is composing works about natural landscapes, encouraging sustainable environment development.

Ha Nguyen