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Let’s talk about poetry, social justice, painting, flowers, and community. I’d love to work with you, or just connect! Please be in touch.
Social Justice
Learn more about Thu’s Social Justice Work
Thu Anh Nguyen is an educator and writer whose work centers around equity and justice. Thu is currently on the National Staff of SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity). The National SEED Project partners with communities, institutions, and schools to develop leaders who guide their peers in conversational communities to drive personal, institutional, and societal change toward social justice. SEED leaders design their SEED seminars with the flexibility to adapt them to their own local needs. They include personal reflection and testimony, listening to others' voices, and learning experientially and collectively, in the context of each participant’s intersecting identities. Through this methodology, SEED equips participants to connect our lives to one another and to society at large by acknowledging systems of power, oppression, and privilege. Thu is also facilitating one community-based SEED group with her co-facilitator Rebecca Farnum.
Thu has taught English, Creative Writing, and History for almost twenty years, most recently at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Thu Anh has led workshops and writes essays about cultural competence and literacy. She is also a published poet. Her writing has been published in Literacy Today, the Southern Humanities Review, the Cider Press Review, and the Crab Orchard Review. She has been honored with a Writing Residency from the InnerLoop Writers Series in Washington, DC. When she is not teaching or writing, Thu Anh is also a watercolor painter and calligrapher who paints large-scale floral powers for social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name.
“We invited Thu to be our middle school MLK Day speaker in January. She made powerful connections between her own story as an immigrant "artivist" and the compelling social justice messages of Martin Luther King Jr. She then visited our middle school art workshops to talk about making art in community with others. We appreciated Thu's comfort interacting with middle school students, depth of message, and gorgeous, inspiring work as an artist.”
— Lesley Younge, Maret Middle School
Explore Projects
50 Years of HOPE and HAHAs Vagabond presents “50 Years of HOPE and HA-HAs,” the DMV’s first Vietnamese American art exhibition, celebrating the expansiveness of the diaspora. 2025 marks the 50-year anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam. The mainstream perception of Viets has remained unchanged for decades, rooted in the suffering of war, yet nothing about our community is static.
In the 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the importance of understanding the Viet experience in saying, “we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”
The exhibition features visual art, poetry, video art, zines and music by over 20 Viet artists including four zine collectives, offering counter narratives from the 1.5 and 2nd generation while uplifting the multi-cultural intersectionality of the diaspora. The theme of resilience is interwoven through joy, memorial, heritage, catharsis, solidarity, representation and community.
The exhibition title comes from Ocean Vuong’s poem, “The Last Dinosaur,” which asks how we can live better despite a destroyed past:
Oh wind-broke wanderer,
widow of hope & ha-has…
I was made to die
but I’m here to stay.
—Ocean Vuong
Hey, We Need To Talk, 2024 In this deeply divided era, one of the hardest things you can do is talk to someone who thinks differently from you. But that’s exactly what we need to do if we want to solve the social and political problems our country faces and if we want to create a society in which everyone flourishes. Strengthening our social bonds happens when we begin to care about each other again. That begins with a conversation. Philippa transformed the Crumpacker Gallery at the University of Michigan Museum of Art into a social sculpture, an artwork that becomes complete when human connections happen, where you can have honest, caring, common sense conversations. This artwork was inspired by the work of U-M Professor Jenna Bednar, who proposes four pillars of flourishing: community, sustainability, dignity, and beauty.
Vagabond Almost 50 years post-war, the Vietnamese-American narrative is still skewed. 13 Vietnamese creatives have decided to change this vision. Vagabond is a Zine featuring interviews and other work with those artists, poets, photographers, designers, and musicians in the DMV area. Co-created by Philippa Pham Hughes and Anthony Trung Quang Le, Vagabond challenges mainstream American beliefs on what it means to be Vietnamese-American through the counter-narratives of its writers. In addition to their interview contributions, each artist was commissioned to write a letter to their younger self as an act of self-care. Vagabond is a powerful reminder of how far the Vietnamese American community has come while serving as a vessel of education to the public. The Zine celebrates rich Vietnamese American excellence through art and healing, a radical act of self-love for both the artists and the community.
We Should Talk is a series of multi-media art installations and programs in which multi-disciplinary Asian American women artists create space to explore the nuances and complexities of what it means to be an Asian American woman. We Should Talk is led by curator and artist Philippa Pham Hughes and artists Xena Ni and Adele 이슬 Kenworthy in collaboration with Thu Anh Nguyen. We apply an aesthetic of care and delight to creating relational spaces in which we share deeply and honestly, learn from one another, explore, and grow together.
SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) partners with communities, organizations, and institutions in bringing people together to learn through self reflection, build relationships through structured dialogue, and create change through systemic analysis.
