Julia Huỳnh is a second generation Vietnamese Canadian interdisciplinary artist, community archivist, and independent researcher/writer. As an award-winning filmmaker, her work has been screened at festivals including: ReFrame Film Festival (Peterborough, ON), Reel Asian International Film Festival (Toronto, ON), Aurora Picture Show (Houston, TX) and SEA x SEA: Southeast Asia x Seattle Film Festival (Seattle, WA). 

She has nearly 10 years of experience in the GLAM sector including but not limited to non-profit organizations, artist-run centres, and ethno-specific community-based archives across North America. She’s deeply passionate about community-driven initiatives that support #SEAingHistory & #SEAingYourself through art, photography, and archives. An experienced grant writer, Julia has secured roughly $85,000 in funding for youth and newcomer initiatives as well as co-created arts-based programming.

She has facilitated multiple workshops on ethics and care in archives, photovoice training, and zine-making to a wide-ranging audience of community members, student leaders, and post-secondary educators. As a co-creator of Empowered Phụ Nữ – an arts-based collective of first and second generation Vietnamese Canadian women, Julia co-led the Empowering Phụ Nữ (EPN) Photovoice Project and serves as a project advisor to a team of youth co-facilitators. She previously worked as a consultant/mentor for VOICE: Visualizing Our Identities and Cultures for Empowerment – a virtual photovoice project that sought to document the impact of COVID-19 on Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities across California. Currently, Julia freelances as an archival researcher/producer for a documentary related to the Vietnamese diaspora.

She holds an MA in photography preservation, HBA in art & art history, and a diploma in fine arts. Some areas of research interests include: ethics and care in archival studies, oral histories, and investigating the use of photography and performance as tools to construct identities, communities, and memories throughout the Vietnamese diaspora. She has spoken about her research and art practice at OCAD University, University of California Irvine, Sheridan College, Association for Asian American Studies Conference (Madison, WI) and Association of Canadian Archivists Conference (online). When she’s not thinking about photographs, storytelling, or what it means for her to be a daughter of the diaspora, Julia likes to doodle, create with clay, and play animal crossing.