Profile of Christine Ha

Christine Ha (born May 9, 1979), Vietnamese American from Houston, Texas, is the first blind contestant and the winner of the third season of MasterChef in 2012.

Profile
Ha lived in Lakewood, California and Long Beach as a young child before her family moved to Houston.
Ha suffers from neuromyelitis optica, in which a person's own immune system attacks the optic nerves and spinal cord. In 1999 she was diagnosed and gradually started losing her vision, and was almost completely blind by 2007, and describes her vision "as looking at a very foggy mirror after a hot shower".
She received a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Finance/MIS from University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and is now a Master of Fine Arts candidate for creative fiction/nonfiction at University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. She recently received the editor's poetry prize from The ScissorTale Review and was a finalist in the 2010 Creative Nonfiction MFA Program-Off contest.
She also serves as Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast Journal and her work has appeared in Fire Point, The ScissorTale Review, and PANK Magazine among others.

MasterChef 2012

While she has never studied cooking, she has a large following on her food blog and she tells "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.'
On September 10th, 2012, Christine Ha was pronounced the winner of the competition, taking away $250,000, the MasterChef title, the MasterChef trophy, and a cookbook deal.