Hanh Nguyen is the Executive Editor for Salon.com where she’s written about TV, film, food and popular culture since 2019. She launched Salon’s first Culture newsletter The Swell, which delves into the art that’s built to last, in 2025.
Nguyen won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards prize twice for her film features interviewing Teo Yoo in “Past Lives” and Ke Huy Quan for his first leading role in the online division. Her story about “The Sympathizer” star Hoa Xuande also took second place in the online division for Diversity in the TV/Streaming Industry. She was also named a finalist for the Southern California Journalism Awards for this cheeky John Mulaney news story, a personal reported essay on the link between ABBA and Vietnam’s lunar new year, and a “KPop Demon Hunters” reported feature about K-pop fandom and Korean folklore.
Nguyen co-hosts the “Good Pop Culture Club” podcast, which examines the good pop that gets us through our days, from an Asian American perspective, and has appeared as a moderator for TV series, movies and storytelling panels. Nguyen has lent her expert commentary to a variety of media outlets, including NPR, American Public Media, the CBC and regularly guests on LAist’s AirTalk. She’s also contributed writing to 2023’s “The Golden Screen: The Movies That Made Asian America” and 2012’s “Beyond the Red Carpet,” and her work has appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, TVGuide.com, IndieWire.com, Los Angeles Magazine and LA Weekly. She was a movie critic and reporter for Tribune Media, for which her work was syndicated in newspapers across the United States. She also had a short-lived food blog called Hungry Hungry Hanh that sadly didn’t last, but her food friends did.
Nguyen was named as one of the 25 journalism leaders for Poynter’s revamped Leadership Academy in 2025. She’s also served as a Board Member in the Television Critics Association, where she’s been a member since the early 2000s. She’s a Rotten Tomatoes-Approved critic and is also a member of the Asian American Journalists Association, Writers Guild of America East, the Online News Association, L.A. Press Club and GALECA Critics.
Nguyen is often down to try new and challenging adventures, including voice acting (she’s dubbed English dialogue for anime and has received her Voice Acting certification), fencing, bouldering, surfing and learning far too many foreign languages at once (she’s making headway on Spanish but her Vietnamese and Korean need work). You can find her thoughts about storytelling, pop culture, creativity, food, travel and cats on Bluesky, Instagram and Threads.
