Spark Artist

Dao Strom is an artist who works in three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author/composer of several hybrid works, most recently the music/poetry project Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs (2025), and the poetry-art collection, Instrument (2020), which won the2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, with its musical companion of song-poems, Traveler’s Ode. She co-curated and co-edited the hybrid-literary anthology and exhibition, A Mouth Holds Many Things (2024), and released an album of ambient-folk songs, Redux (2022). She is also the author of a bilingual poetry-art collection, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song-cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Ford Family Foundation, Precipice Fund, NEA, and others. She has presented performance and installation works at the Time Based Art Festival (PICA), and other venues. She is the co-founder of two collaborative art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese women writers and artists making polyvocal poetry-art works; and De-Canon, a literary social art project centering BIPOC writers. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevadas of northern California and lives in Portland, Oregon.

‍