Born May 9, 1979, in Los Angeles County, California, Christine Hà is the first ever blind contestant and season 3 winner of the competitive amateur cooking television show, “MasterChef” U.S., on FOX with Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot, and Joe Bastianich.
Her parents were of Vietnamese origin. 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.