Tammy was born and raised in San Francisco, California. She received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. In 2007 she received a Fulbright Fellowship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam. She has shown her work in the United States at El Ricon Gallery, Houston, TX; Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY and Industry City, Brooklyn, NY, as well as in Vietnam at San-Art.

Nguyen now resides in The Bronx, New York, and works in Westport, Connecticut, where she is the art instructor at Pierrepont School. She is currently a 2014 Van Lier Fellow at Wave Hill and will participating in The Bronx Museum AIM Biennial in 2015. She was recently awarded awarded a Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Book Arts from the Center for Book Arts, New York, NY.