Christine Ha is the first ever blind contestant and season 3 winner of the competitive amateur cooking television show, MasterChef USA on FOX, with Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot, and Joe Bastianich. She defeated over 30,000 home cooks across America to secure the coveted MasterChef title, a $250,000 cash prize, and a cookbook deal.

“The lady has an extraordinary palate, a palate of incredible finesse. She picks up hot ingredients, touches them, and she thinks about this image on the plate. She has the most disciplined execution on a plate that we’ve ever seen. But the palate is where it’s just extraordinary. And honestly, I know chefs with Michelin stars that don’t have palates like hers.” –Chef Gordon Ramsay, MasterChef judge

Christine also has a Master of Fine Arts from University of Houston’s nationally acclaimed Creative Writing Program. During her time there, she served as Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She is currently working on a memoir.

Christine’s first cookbook, Recipes From My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food (Rodale, 2013), was a New York Times best-seller. She has been featured on NPR and the BBC; made guest appearances on “MasterChef” Vietnam; and travels around the globe to give inspiring keynote addresses and cooking demonstrations, including a TEDx talk at University of California, San Diego, in May 2015. Her latest foray into television is a Canadian cooking show on AMI called Four Senses (Varner Productions), on which she is a co-host with Carl Heinrich, season 2 winner of “Top Chef” Canada. “Four Senses aims to encourage visually impaired individuals to get cooking in the kitchen and will begin production of its third season this fall.

Christine received the 2014 Helen Keller Personal Achievement Award from the American Foundation for the Blind, a recognition formerly bestowed upon Ray Charles, Patty Duke, and Stevie Wonder among others. Christine resides with her husband and two dogs in Houston, Texas.