Thy Phu is a Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora and Visual Studies at the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, where she is also Department Chair. After completing her PhD at the University of California Berkeley, and a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, she joined Western University, where for more than a decade, she taught courses on visual studies, cultural theory, and Asian North American culture. Her research and public humanities practice examine the intersections between media studies, diaspora and migration, vision and justice, and is author of two monographs, Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture and Warring Visions: Vietnam and Photography. She has also co-edited three book volumes, Feeling Photography,  Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada, and  Cold War Camera. She is also co-Director of Refugee States, a SSHRC-funded collaborative research project, which partners with community organizations to create a counter-archive of refugee and migrant digital storytelling that challenges meta narratives of forced migration. In 2017, she was elected as member of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists at the Royal Society of Canada. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed, open-access international journal of Trans Asia Photography and has held visiting positions at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and Yale University.