The Artist

1984 New Hampshire, USA

Elizabeth Rush has crossed borders with Bangladeshi cattle smugglers, built homes with Lima’s squatters, and participated in the underground performance art scene in Yangon, Myanmar and Hanoi, Vietnam.

Rush has long been interested in what is lost during times of profound physical and cultural transformation. Her work focuses on how humans adapt when change is thrust upon them by forces beyond their control. The artist artfully blends analog photography, the lyric essay, and edited interview transcriptions into her writing. She is the author of many books including the critically acclaimed Rising, Dispatches from the New American shore in 2018, finalist for the Pulitzer prize in General Nonfiction, a Chicago Tribune top ten book of 2018 and other awards, Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar (Global Directions / ThingsAsian Press 2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, Orion, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, Al Jazeera, Creative Nonfiction, Witness, the Huffington Post, Frieze, Asian Geographic, The Dark Mountain Project and others.

Rush is also the editor of Lost & Found Hanoi (ThingsAsian Press 2014), a collection of photographs that captures the essence of present-day North Vietnam. She has collaborated with a number of South East Asia’s leading artists including Hanoi’s own Nguyen Nghia Cuong and Maritta Nurmi’s, for ThingsAsian Kids, Alphabetical World Series, Z Is for Zodiac. ThingsAsianKids is dedicated to making books that will help children hold the farthest corners of the world in their hands, in their minds, and in their hearts.

Rush is the recipient of the Howard Foundation Fellowship from Brown University (2016-2017) and the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Bates College (2015-2017) where she designed and taught creative nonfiction courses that carry the environmental sciences, digital technologies, and photography into the humanities classroom. She earned her BA in English from Reed College, Oregon, USA and MFA in Nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University, USA.

Elizabeth worked at the Art Vietnam Gallery from 2006-8 and is a beloved member of our team. She currently resides in Providence, Rhode Island and is a professor of creative writing at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.