Mimi Thi Nguyen

Born in 1974 in Ho Chi Minh City to Hiep and Lien Nguyen, Nguyen earned a bachelor's degree in Women's Studies and a doctorate in Ethnic Studies from University of California, Berkeley. Her master's degree was in American Studies from New York University.[4] She grew up in Minnesota and relocated to San Diego, California, where she was drawn to the D.I.Y. punk scene.[5]

Appointed in Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies, Nguyen earned tenure in 2012 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[6] She is a frequent conference keynote speaker or invited panelist,[7] and received the Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association of Asian American Studies, 2014[8] for her first single-author monograph, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt and Other Refugee Passages.

Nguyen is possibly best known for her compilation zine Evolution of a Race Riot first published in 1997 with a second issue in 2002,[9] in which she and contributors of color challenged racism in the punk scene.[10][11] She also publishes the zine Slander and is a former Punk Planet columnist and Maximumrocknroll contributor. In June 2013, Sarah McCarry's Guillotine ("a series of erratically published chapbooks focused on revolutionary non-fiction") released PUNK, a conversation between Nguyen and Golnar Nikpour, which later informed a 2016 exhibition at the Arnolfini called "Moving Targets."[12]

Nguyen also cofounded a fashion blog with Minh-Ha T. Pham that discusses the politics, history, and aesthetics of beauty and fashion.[13]

Nguyen lists the Riot Grrrl movement as one that is important and yet problematic. In her essay "Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival", Nguyen discusses the work the Riot Grrrl movement has done in calling attention to how a woman's personal experiences with sexual abuse, heteronormativity, and intimacy with other women are tied up with the political and social. Collectivity among women being one of Riot Grrrl's goals, Nguyen addresses race as an obstacle to that collectivity, highlighting the marginalization of women of color.[14]

Nguyen created Evolution of a Race Riot as a compilation zine based in North America. Nguyen originally put out the first flier for zine submissions in August 1995 and the first issue was published in 1997. The entire zine is written by people of color mostly in the punk and Riot Grrrl scene.[15] According to Nguyen in her introduction to the first issue of the zine, most of the submissions are written by mixed race or Asian-American people of color.