Chan Chao is an American photographer, born in 1966 in Kalemyo, Burma (now Myanmar). His family moved to the United States in 1978. He studied photography under John Gossage at the University of Maryland. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and teaches at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University.
At thirty he crossed into Burma from Thailand and photographed people in the rebel camps along the Thai-Burma border, among them student activists from the 1988 uprising. These portraits became Burma: Something Went Wrong (Nazraeli Press, 2000) and Letter from PLF (Nazraeli Press, 2001), and they were shown at the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His other books are Echo (2004) and Two Places on Earth (Nazraeli Press, 2022).
His photographs are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum.
