Thuy-Van Vu was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. Her father (a pilot in the Southern Vietnamese air force) and her mother (a schoolteacher) were Vietnamese refugees who fled to the United States in April of 1975. Thuy-Van was born the following autumn. She left Phoenix shortly after graduating high school in 1994 to study art in Maine, and a year later left Maine to study at the Rhode Island School of Design. In her senior year, Thuy-Van was accepted into RISD's European Honors Program and lived for a year in Rome, Italy, where she spent the year seeing as much art as possible in Italy and also other parts of Europe. Thuy-Van returned to Providence and worked at RISD until moving to Seattle in 2000. She left Seattle for three years to attend the University of Texas in Austin on a fellowship, receiving her MFA for painting in 2006. Her work has been shown in Austin, Los Angeles, New York, Rome and Seattle. When not in studio, Thuy-Van works for Sakya Monastery of Tibetan Buddhism as a graphic designer and for the Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine as an academic coordinator. She currently lives in the Central District with her partner Yogi. They are expecting their first child in June.