Mina Ho Ferrante is a Vietnamese painter, and art educator based in Burbank, California. Her creative journey has unfolded across a range of cultural and professional settings—from painting in Vietnam and feature animation in the United States to an independent fine art practice. Throughout Mina’s career, her work has explored themes of memory, family, migration, identity, loss, and human resilience.
Mina’s childhood in Vietnam was deeply shaped by war and social upheaval. By the late 1980s, she had begun to establish herself within the country’s art community. A watercolor-on-silk work created in 1988 was included in her first solo exhibition in Vietnam. The painting depicts an old neighborhood, with the architecture and rhythms of daily life characteristic of a period before urbanization and the growth of tourism transformed many familiar landscapes. In Mina’s view, such scenes are not merely visual records; they also preserve memories of a Vietnam gradually receding from view.
In 1991, Mina moved to the United States and reunited with her family. Starting over in a new country brought the joy of reunion, but it also left her feeling disoriented. She had left behind the professional reputation, income, and social network she had built in Vietnam. While waiting to begin college, Mina sought to reconnect with painting as a means of preserving her identity and restoring a sense of balance to her life. Works from this period reflect her loneliness, her longing to create, and the experience of having to reconstruct her sense of self as an immigrant.
Mina later entered the field of feature animation and worked at Disney Feature Animation. Her experience in animation strengthened her abilities in visual storytelling, composition, and the observation of character gestures. However, after becoming a mother, she chose to leave her professional career in order to devote most of her time to caring for her three children. This transition became a significant turning point in both her life and her art.
The painting Siblings portrays Mina’s children playing together on an electronic device. It captures an intimate family moment while also reflecting the growing role of technology in the ways children communicate and connect. At the same time, the work expresses two aspects of Mina’s identity that coexist within her: mother and artist. Beneath the simplicity of the domestic scene lies the emotional experience of a woman who placed her career on hold, quietly confronting the loss of her professional identity while also finding meaning and joy in raising her family.
When her youngest child entered middle school, Mina felt a renewed and increasingly urgent need to return to art-making. Between 2016 and 2020, she gradually developed her own network of collectors and participated in exhibitions and art programs in the United States and abroad. She also taught drawing and painting to both children and adults, building parallel careers as a practicing artist and an art educator.
Family life and the spaces of everyday living have remained important sources of inspiration in Mina’s work. She paints pots and pans in her kitchen, flowers arranged in a room, family members in private moments, and familiar neighborhoods in Burbank. Through these seemingly modest subjects, Mina draws attention to the beauty present in ordinary life—details that may go unnoticed unless we slow down and take the time to observe them.
From 2014 to 2025, Mina worked on a long-term project illustrating her family’s memoir. The project recounts a multigenerational journey from Vietnam to the United States, encompassing memories of the land reform campaigns of the 1950s, violence and instability, repeated attempts to escape, postwar poverty, and a perilous sea crossing in the 1980s. The series does more than illustrate historical events; it creates an intimate chronicle of sacrifice, reunion, healing, and the gradual process of developing a new sense of home in America.
Mina Ho Ferrante’s artistic practice encompasses painting, watercolor on silk, drawing, illustration, and a visual sensibility shaped by her experience in animation. Although she works across a variety of media and styles, people and memory remain at the center of her art. Images of family, nature, interior spaces, neighborhoods, and migration history are united by her enduring interest in the resilience of the human spirit.
Mina continues to create, exhibit, and participate in the local arts community through organizations such as the Burbank Art Association. At this stage of her career, she regards painting as an ongoing search for her own artistic voice. In the face of uncertainty in both personal life and the wider world, Mina’s work retains a spirit of hope—a belief that people can endure dark times, continue to dream, and gradually bring those dreams into reality.
