Dr. Amira de la Garza served as the acting director of the North American Center of Transborder Studies (NACTS) at ASU through February 2007 after chairing its founding steering committee in 2004. Hired as the first Southwest Borderlands Scholar at ASU in 2002, she is also a member of the Affiliate Faculty for the Women & Gender Studies Program at ASU and affiliated with the Center for Latin American Research at ASU.

Dr. de la Garza's research is in the area of borderlands identities, with a special interest in postcolonial methodology for ethnography and multi-genre autoethnographic texts & performance. She received special commendation by the National Communication Association Ethnography Division for her influence on the field’s scholarship in 2003. She has held two Fulbright scholarships to Mexico and currently chairs the NACTS Migration Narratives research cluster, funded by ASU's Institute for Humanities Research, and collaborating with the Performance in the Borderlands Project of ASU's School of Theatre and Film. She is currently preparing material for a book exploring the relationships between gendered cultural experience, memory, and trauma in the creation of narrative identity. She chairs the NACTS Migration Narratives research cluster and is collaborating on a transdisciplinary study of U.S.-Mexican border communities.

Dr. de la Garza earned her doctorate in communication at the University of Texas at Austin in 1986.