Yvonne Tran is an education/nonprofit professional in Southern California who has over 15 years of experience with multimedia production, teaching, consulting/strategy, and marketing across industries (education, non-profit, consulting, public health, and consumer goods). Since 2013, Yvonne has served with VAALA in various capacities, including Viet Film Fest director to board member. She received her undergraduate degree in Communication from UC San Diego and a Master’s degree in Applied Research at Boston University’s College of Communication. Yvonne also participated in the Fulbright-Hays funded program, the Vientamese Advanced Summer Institute (VASI) to study Vietnamse language in Saigon.

Julie currently serves as Policy Director at the Orange County Asian & Pacific Islander Community Alliance (OCAPICA) where she leads and supports policy and civic engagement efforts which include nonpartisan voter mobilization and GOTV, community and legislative advocacy, community education, and the integration of policy advocacy and civic engagement across the agency’s direct service departments. Previously, she served as Director of Development at Environmental Charter Schools in Los Angeles. She is also the Advisory Board Chair of Orange County Environmental Justice and is a member of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative Steering Committee. Julie has more than fifteen years of experience in nonprofit development and fundraising, youth development, and community arts, particularly in Orange County and is committed to developing powerful youth, promoting artistic expression as a way to nurture community, and building strategies for change within communities of color. She has taught at the National Academy of Social Sciences in Vietnam, has been honored for her community leadership by the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative and was awarded Best Advocacy Voice by New American Media (NAM). Julie holds a B.A. in Sociology and Asian American Studies and a minor in Education from UCLA.

Thuy Vo Dang is the Curator for the Southeast Asian Archive (SEAA) at UC Irvine, which documents the history of the Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese diaspora. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego and specializes in oral history, cultural studies, immigration and refugee studies, and community archives. Since 2010, she has served on the VAALA Board of Directors and joined the Arts Orange County Board of Directors in 2016. She is co-author of Vietnamese in Orange County, a visual history book that documents forty years of the community. In 2017 Thuy co-curated an art and history exhibit called “After-lives of War,” which features refugee artwork from Hong Kong and celebrates thirty years of the SEAA. She is currently working on A People’s Guide to Orange County (forthcoming, UC Press), a book that foregrounds stories of the region through a social justice lens. Thuy is committed to preserving and disseminating Vietnamese arts and culture for her three children (Allyse, Austen, and Avery) and their generation.

Thao Ha earned a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a professor of Sociology at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, CA, and has published a variety of academic works in the areas of race, gender, immigration, and Vietnamese American experiences in the South. She is an advisor and associate producer of Seadrift, a documentary about the racial violence and KKK intimidation that erupted in the 1970s against Vietnamese Americans in a small Texas fishing town. Her current project is focused on Vietnamese American incarceration. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Oceanside Promise, a non-profit collective impact organization addressing the needs of its community’s youth, and on the advisory board of the Asian Culture and Media Alliance in San Diego, CA.

Tu-Uyen Nguyen, Ph.D., was born in Vietnam, but left with her family by boat in 1979. She is currently a professor in the Asian American Studies Program at Cal State Fullerton. She received her masters and Ph.D. degrees in public health from UCLA and works closely with various Asian and Pacific Islander communities nationwide on collaborative health programs focusing on cancer education and linguistic and cultural competency. Tu-Uyen has been involved in organizing the Vietnamese International Film Festival (ViFF) since the first installment in 2003.

Matthew is a transformational leader who advocates for youth mental health across our country by holding space for others and sharing stories about how he navigated the intersections of his Vietnamese and Queer identities. Born and raised in Rosemead, CA by parents who fled their motherlands during the Vietnam war, Matthew is now the Founder and Executive Director of Psypher, a nonprofit based in the San Gabriel Valley that is led by AAPI, Transitional-Aged-Youth (TAY) who have used the expressive arts to facilitate mental health workshops for thousands of youth across the country. Matthew also brings his leadership to Center for the Pacific Asian Family (CPAF) as a Community Youth Organizer where he supports youth advocates to help end sexual violence in their communities. In 2019, Matthew’s advocacy work allowed him to help bring together hundreds of youth and adult allies to propose youth-led solutions to school-based preventative mental health in an inaugural multi-county collaborative called the Youth Innovation Idea Labs hosted by the Mental Health Services Oversight & Accountability Commission’s (MHSOAC). In addition to his experiences as a community organizer, Matthew holds a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Entrepreneurship from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Matthew is committed to ending cycles of violence in his family and community by reclaiming his pride as a Gay Vietnamese man and unapologetically sharing about his journey in doing so.