Our Team

We are a team of volunteers & mostly organized from Maison Chance USA members who network, share skills, and promote their specialties with Maison Chance Studio Viet Nam together. Our team forms around a shared location, crafting medium, or another interest. We work closely with dedicated professionals designers and professional artists in Vietnam guiding the production and the quality of our products.

Ai Dang Nguyen
Director of E-Commerce

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Ai has over 12 years of professional interior design and site space planning. She is the founder and managing director of Ai Nguyen — Interiors with Asian Sensibility, an interior design firm based in Seattle, WA, specializing in hospitality, commercial and restaurant industries.
She is participating as member of the Washington Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce Association in Seattle.
She defines herself as a passionate, fun and a sensitive person, but for us at Maison Chance, with her many different artistic skills, Ai is a key asset for the Art, Sewing & Wood shops, where her creativity and management style are behind many aspects of designing, production and quality control of the products made by our artisans. She also works with the architects in the space planning for the current Village Chance project.
Graduated from the University of Washington with a BFA in Industrial Design, she practices her profession with passion, apart from raising two beautiful kids, a boy and a girl.

Joel Hanh Nguyen
Artistic Advisor

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Joel Hanh has over 20 years of professional architecture and site planning experience spanning across three continents. Beginning in Europe, Joel refined his skills at the School of Fine Art of the University of Rome, Italy and then at the prestigious Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decos, Paris. In 1978, he received a scholarship from the Paris Institute of Fashion Design after a short sting at the French Department of Education and Crafts. Moving to North America, he worked for HTI, Environetics and Gensler, the top three design and architecture firms in the US before joining the Department of Justice (2004) and the Federal Trade Commission (2008) as architect-Real estate specialist. His passion for helping non-profit organizations led him to undertake many projects with Food & Friends, Whitman & Walker Clinics, Asian American Lead, Children Defense Fund and DC Diabetic Fund. Since 2008, he returned to his roots in Asia by joining the Maison Chance team as lead architect coordinator for the Village Chance project.
Joel´s passion for design led him to other aspects of artistic arts such as painting and photography. Among his many clients are: the World Bank, IBM, CBS headquarters, Verizon, AT&T, Citibank, Macy´s, Bloomingdale´s, Cartier, US Federal Reserve, Smithsonian Museum.

Jim Gion
Visiting Artist

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Jim Gion is a professional sculptor living in Portland, Oregon. Jim studied fine arts at Oregon State and Portland State Universities where he received his BA. After graduation he moved to Japan where he taught EFL at Iwate Medical University for ten years. During this time he maintained a sculpture studio and produced numerous works in clay and plaster. In 1984 Jim returned to the US and built his own foundry and began casting and finishing his own bronzes. Jim´s work is featured in international collections and he has completed many commissions for private, public and religious organizations.
Jim offers his help with teaching the disabled and the children at Maison Chance in Vietnam to know how to create beautiful artwork in the field of sculpture, which helps increase the diversity of Masion Chance’s capability to produce more art products for supporting its missions. His teaching will be starting with bas-relief and paper casting, a 3D type of medium that does not require to set up lots of equipment. Also, the materials is easily to work with the basic process & will give the beneficiaries at Maison Chance a foundation for creating other sculptural materials like ceramic.