Nguyễn Thanh Thủy is a leading đàn tranh player/improviser in both traditional and experimental music. She was born into a theatre family and was raised with traditional Vietnamese music from an early age in Hà Nội. She studied at the Hanoi Conservatory of Music where she received her diploma in 1998, followed by a Master of Arts at the Institute of Cultural Studies in 2003. Since 2000 she holds a teaching position at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. She has toured in Asia, Europe and the USA. She has received many distinctions including the First Prize and the Outstanding Traditional Music Performer Prize in the National Competition of Zither Talents in 1998. Nguyễn Thanh Thủy has recorded several CD’s as soloist with orchestra and solo CDs, which were released by Phương Nam Film Vietnam; by dB Productions Sweden; by Setola di Maiale Italia and by Neuma Records & Publications USA. She collaborates with composers such as Richard Karpen (US), Kent Olofsson (SE), Nguyễn Thiện Đạo (FR/VN) and Trần Thị Kim Ngọc (VN).
The last ten years she has been collaborating extensively with choreographers, composers and theatre directors on many interdisciplinary projects. Between 2009 and 2011, she was involved as an artistic researcher in the international research project (re)thinking improvisation, a collaboration between the Vietnam National Academy of Music and the Malmö Academy of Music. Between 2012 and 2019 she carried out an artistic doctoral project at the Malmö Academy of Music concerned with gesture in traditional Vietnamese music. She received her PhD degree in November 2019. Between 2019 and 2021 she was a postdoctoral researcher in Musical Transformations, a senior artistic research project looking at musical change, in transcultural and intercultural settings.
Between 2021-22 Nguyễn is an international postdoctoral research fellow at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and at the Institute of Arts, Faculty of Education Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her artistic research project Music and identity in diaspora is funded by the Swedish Research Council.