Vietnamese-American Photographer and Oberlin Professor Pipo Nguyen-duy Found Dead at 64

Pipo Nguyen-duy, a professor at Ohio’s Oberlin College and Conservatory and a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, was found dead at 64 in an off-campus home on Wednesday.

ABC News reports that Nguyen-duy’s son, Daniel Jones (formerly known as Asia Nguyen-duy), has been charged in connection with a double homicide for the murder of his father and stepmother, Tran Thi Phong. Nguyen-duy and Phong were found fatally shot by local police.

“The male victim was discovered on the first floor of the residence, and the female victim was discovered on the second floor. Both victims suffered from multiple gunshot wounds,” police said in a statement on Thursday. The victims’ bodies were discovered on Wednesday.

Jones appeared in court on Thursday afternoon in handcuffs and ankle shackles. He was ordered to be held in jail, and a bail was set at $3 million. Jones was arrested on Wednesday without incident after an Oberlin resident called police to report a “wet disheveled man” at her front door. About 90 minutes before the bodies were found, police officers were called to an Oberlin College campus parking lot to support firefighters extinguishing a fire in a vehicle that was registered to Jones.

In court, prosecutor Zachary Simonoff said that Jones asked the resident to record a video of him to post online. “He told her that he did not want the police involved. In the video, he identifies himself as Asia Nguyen-duy, says he’s escaping a cult. He also says, ‘Everything I did was on my own accord and I take full responsibility,’” said Simonoff in court. “Officers went there and found two people dead apparently from gunshot wounds with blood throughout the house.” In court, Simonoff said that Jones told officers that he “killed his family” when they first spoke to him and gave the officers his father’s address.

Simonoff added that police have contacted Jones’s mother in Oregon. She told them that her son is psychotic and needs medication. A motive for the shooting remains under investigation.

The weapon allegedly used in the shooting has not been found, according to the prosecutor.

Pipo Nguyen-duy had been a professor of studio art and photography at Oberlin College since 1998. “Tragedies such as this one intrude upon our lives in jarring ways. I am simply overwhelmed with sadness, and I am deeply concerned about the impact of the devastating loss of Pipo to our community,” said Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar in a statement on Wednesday addressed to students and colleagues. “Pipo was beloved. During his years at Oberlin, he touched all of us through his passion for photography. Our community will be hurting for a very long time, and when the shock of this news subsides, we will all need to process our grief. This process will sometimes be together and sometimes alone, but we will need to take the time to do so.”

Nguyen-duy had immigrated from Vietnam in 1975 as a political refugee and went on to become an internationally exhibited visual artist. He took up photography in his late 20s and pursued it academically, receiving his MA and MFA from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. “In his wide-ranging body of work, Nguyen-duy considered immigration and emigration, intimacy, abandonment and decay, cultural assimilation, and the cost of war,” said a tribute post from the Guggenheim Foundation on Instagram. “And he touched people all over the world with his probing, compassionate work.”

In 2023, Nguyen-duy participated in the 15th Sharjah Biennial, exhibiting photographs of schoolchildren playing in what looks like the Vietnam countryside, with some napping on felled trees while others have assault rifles tucked under their arms.