Website www.christineha.com TV shows MasterChef, Metroguide Spouse John Suh (m. 2011) | Role Chef Name Christine Ha | |
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Full Name Christine Huyen Tran Ha Books Recipes from My Home Kitchen Nominations James Beard Award for Best Local Television Cooking Show Similar People Luca Manfe, Joe Bastianich, Jennifer Behm Profiles | ||
Christine Ha (Deficiente Visual) - Vencedora do Masterchef USA -
Christine Huyentran Hà (何弦珍; born May 9, 1979) is an American chef, writer, and TV host. She is the first blind contestant of MasterChef and the winner of its third season in 2012.
Contents
- Christine Ha Deficiente Visual Vencedora do Masterchef USA
- Early and personal life
- 2012 MasterChef USA Recipes from My Home Kitchen Asian and American Comfort Food
- 2013 Present Four Senses Masterchef Vietnam guest appearances
- References
Early and personal life
Hà was born in Los Angeles County, California, an only child. Her parents were of Vietnamese origin. She lived in Lakewood, California and Long Beach, California as a young child before her family moved to Houston, Texas. Her mother died from lung cancer when Hà was 14. Her paternal aunt also died from the same illness, even though both were non-smokers.
Hà suffers from neuromyelitis optica, in which a person's own immune system attacks the optic nerves and spinal cord. In 2004, she was diagnosed and gradually started losing her vision, and was almost completely blind by 2007. She describes her vision as "looking at a very foggy mirror after a hot shower". She uses adaptive technologies to help her manage her social media profiles by herself.
Hà received a Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance and MIS from University of Texas at Austin in 2001, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Fiction and Nonfiction at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program in 2012. She received the editor's poetry prize from The ScissorTale Review and was a finalist in the 2010 Creative Nonfiction MFA Program-Off contest.
Hà serves as Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast Journal and her work has appeared in Fire Point, The ScissorTale Review, and PANK Magazine, among others. In January 2014 she began hosting the cooking show Four Senses on AMI-TV.
2012: MasterChef USA & Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food
While she has never studied cooking, she has a large following on her food blog. She states: "I have to depend a lot more on the other senses to cook – taste, smell, how certain ingredients feel", adding that cooking without sight just involves "a lot of organization".
In the nineteen episodes where she competed on the third season of MasterChef, Hà won seven times in both individual and team challenges; additionally, she placed three times in the top three group. However, she was also in the bottom group twice. On September 10, 2012, Hà was announced the winner of the competition and took away $250,000, the MasterChef title, the MasterChef trophy, and a cookbook deal.
Her cookbook, Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food (ISBN 978-1623360948), was released on May 14, 2013.
2013-Present: Four Senses, Masterchef Vietnam & guest appearances
In 2013, Hà began co-hosting the Canadian TV show Four Senses with Carl Heinrich, the winner of Season 2 of Top Chef Canada. It is a cooking show geared towards the visually impaired, and airs on AMI (Accessible Media, Inc.) TV, a Canadian cable network designed to make television accessible to the vision and hearing impaired. To compensate for the vision-impaired, the show contains a great deal of audio description, where they are narrating what’s going on in the kitchen, what they're doing, how things feel or smell or sound.
In 2015, she revealed on her blog and Facebook that she would become a judge on the third season of MasterChef Vietnam, having been a guest judge in the previous series, and a guest judge of US MasterChef (season 4), making her the first former contestant and winner worldwide to become a regular judge, and also the third ever female judge after Michal Ansky of Israel and Christina Tosi. In the meantime, she also returned along with Luca Manfé and Courtney Lapresi as guests of US MasterChef (season 6). Later in the year, she also made an appearance in MasterChef Celebrity Showdown in the battle of "Champions vs Juniors", where she, alongside Season 4 winner Luca Manfe and Season 6 winner Claudia Sandoval, cooked against 3 contestants from MasterChef Junior season 4 in a Salmon Wellington tag team battle. The three champions emerged as the winner and donate their winnings to their chosen charity.
She also revealed that she was the first chef/author to become the winner of Helen Keller Personal Achievement Award in 2014, an award to people and organizations that "demonstrated outstanding achievement in improving quality of life for people with vision loss". Past/current winners included musicians Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Tom Sullivan, actor Charlie Cox (who portrayed a blind superhero, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, was awarded in June 2015) and businessman Bernard A. Newcomb.