Woo was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and attended an international high school in Tokyo, Japan.

[1] Her father, Yong-Hai Woo, was a noted economic planner and diplomat who led the reparation mission for South Korea in Japan.

She serves as an occasional guest expert on Asian politics for such media outlets as PBS, CNN, and The New York Times.

In 2015 she took leave of absence from the University of Virginia to direct the International Higher Education Program for the Open Society Foundations, which was responsible for creation and support of over fifty liberal arts colleges in the former Soviet bloc countries.

Her book Neoliberalism and Reform in East Asia (2007) was the result of a project sponsored by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and the Rockefeller Foundation.

She was executive producer of Koryo Saram: The Unreliable People, a film about Stalin's ethnic cleansing of Koreans during the Great Terror.

It premiered at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and won the Best Documentary Award from the National Film Board of Canada in 2008.