Thanh Tân is a Vietnamese American storyteller, filmmaker, and cultural worker based in Seattle, Washington. An award-winning journalist who began her career in local television newsrooms, she reports and writes to spark dialogue and drive change — work featured on This American Life, The Texas Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe and The New York Times. As a brand storyteller, she led global multimedia initiatives for Microsoft and shaped mission-driven narratives at Starbucks. Today she works independently, directing documentaries and building cultural archives rooted in the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diasporas.

Drawn to history and her identity as a daughter of Vietnamese boat refugees, Thanh created and hosted Second Wave, a podcast from KUOW and PRX centering the postwar Vietnamese refugee experience. She later co-founded Viet Fact Check to combat misinformation in Vietnamese-speaking communities, and in 2021 helped launch Viets for Afghans, a Vietnamese American–led mutual aid effort supporting Afghan refugees. That work led to her directorial debut: Refuge After War, a five-part docuseries for KCTS/Crosscut.

Thanh is also a sought-after interviewer and moderator of conversations about the Asian diaspora, politics, and culture. She has facilitated talks for organizations including Seattle Arts & Lectures, King County Public Library, Town Hall Seattle, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, and PeaceTrees Vietnam. Her featured subjects have included Viet Thanh Nguyen, Amanda Nguyen, the late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Ken Burns, and Lynn Novick.

Her work reflects a deep commitment to cultural preservation and community storytelling. She is co-founder and DJ of SEA Vinyl Society, a collective dedicated to preserving and performing analog forms of Asian diasporic music. As MOHAI's Curator's Fellow, she organized Reframing Seattle's Southeast Asian Histories, on view at the Museum of History & Industry through September 2026 — an exhibit that recontextualizes how Vietnamese, Laotian, Hmong, and Cambodian refugees have been represented in the museum's collections and underscores the importance of preserving family and community histories.

Recent exhibits include two 2025 projects drawing on South Vietnamese cultural memory: Kho Tàng Nhạc Vàng / Vietnam's Golden Music Archive at ARTS at King Street Station, featuring rare vinyl, sheet music, and photographs from South Vietnam's golden music era; and We Were Soldiers, Too / Chúng Tôi Cũng Là Lính at Friends of Little Saigon's Creative Space, marking the 50th anniversary of the war's end with portraits by Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist Marcus Yam and oral histories of elderly Republic of Vietnam veterans, many of whom fought in the final battle at Xuân Lộc.

Her current projects extend this commitment to preservation. She is directing her first independent documentary, Che's Last Stand, which uncovers untold stories of South Vietnamese soldiers and the legacies at risk of erasure from history; continuing to build Kho Tàng Nhạc Vàng / Vietnam's Golden Music Archive, a growing collection of vinyl, sheet music, and other pre-1975 ephemera; and, separately, preserving records and oral histories of the former Republic of Vietnam.