Joanna Chen Cham is the Lead for Emerging Literacies Librarian at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she creates, delivers, implements, and supports digital scholarship and emerging literacies instruction and library services into undergraduate instruction. Prior to joining UCLA, Joanna served as the L.A. as Subject Resident Archivist at the University of Southern California, which included rotations at Occidental College and The Wende Museum, and as the Archive and Exhibit Manager at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Joanna has also previously worked at USC Shoah Foundation as a Nanjing Massacre Testimonies Indexer, the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies as a Civic Engagement Fellow, and USC Libraries as a ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow, and was an Association of Research Libraries/Society of American Archivists Mosaic Fellow, ARL Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce Fellow, and ALA Spectrum Scholar.

She is an alumna of UCLA, where she received her Master of Library & Information Science and Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate, and of UC Berkeley, where she focused on Holocaust history and human rights. Her passions and experience working with survivors and stories of genocide inspired her to pursue librarianship in order to continue collecting, making accessible, and teaching the stories of different communities.