About
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), winner of the 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion piece, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press, 2018); a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West (2015); and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2019, 2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003). Her works also include interdisciplinary music/poetry performance and visual-poetry installations. She received a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship and a 2016 Creative Capital Artist Award. Her work has received support also from the Oregon Community Foundation/Creative Heights Grant, Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), Precipice Fund/Warhol Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, and others.
Strom is a founding member of two collaborative art projects: She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora; and De-Canon, a literary + social art + publishing project highlighting books and works by writers of color.
Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches with Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing.
+ IG: @herandthesea
+ Contact: herandthesea@gmail.com
UPCOMING / RECENT
2024
Feb 23-24: Poetry/Music Performances, POG Arts + Golden Saguaro, Tucson, AZ
Mar 26: Poetry Performance w/ She Who Has No Master(s) @ Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
Apr 10-22: She Who Has No Master(s) at Mass MoCA Artists Residency, North Adams, MA
(Re)Configurations, poetry-art collaboration with Adam Kuby + De-Canon (poets: Anis Mojgani, Dao Strom, Sam Roxas-Chua, Samiya Bashir, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Trevino Brings Plenty), for public artwork, Mount Tabor Park, Portland, OR.
Forthcoming Publication: A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection, De-Canon x Fonograf Editions; co-editors: Dao Strom & Jyothi Natarajan. Pub date: 5/14/24. Preorder
Jun 6-Jul 28: A Mouth Holds Many Things, group art exhibition, hosted by Stelo Arts, Portland, OR; co-curators: Dao Strom & Jyothi Natarajan. (Artists: Stephanie Adams-Santos, Samiya Bashir, Jennifer S. Cheng, Carolina Ebeid, Nadia Haji Omar & Christine Shan Shan Hou, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Monica Ong, Paisley Rekdal, Sasha Stiles, Anna Martine Whitehead)
ARTIST STATEMENT
In considering “voice”, or that which seeks to be voiced, as an immateriality that cannot be contained or definitively conveyed via any one body—any single medium or context—my work concerns itself with the necessity of polyvocality and mutability, in terms both of content and form. This uncontainability, characteristic of hybrid and diasporic identities, lends itself also to a contemplation of fragments and fragmentation—of/within selves, histories, cultures, groups of people, and places.
My primary material is language—which may articulate as arrangements of poetry, music, image, song and sound, to be experienced as writing, recordings, performance, installation, multimedia, and inside the spaces of a book. Although separate and multiple these elements are unified by a shared (under)current that transposes itself through or despite its conduits, and endeavors towards “re-membering” and attempting to synchronize the divided ‘languages’ within the self and concerning the self as placed in the world.
I was born in Vietnam in the wake of a war. My parents were writers and artists before me, in a time and setting when performing such acts of “voice” was perilous—my birth father spent ten years in the Communist "reeducation camps" after the war as persecution for his work as a writer. With my mother and brother I fled as a refugee, and grew up in a Vietnamese-Danish-American family in a small town in the hills of northern California on the same riverbanks where gold was “discovered” in 1848. I grew up communing with pine trees and ponies. I don’t speak Vietnamese but have wrestled for many years with a sense of burden, legacy, sorrow, and debt to those origins. At the same time, identity and self-definition remain fluid and elusive matters for me. Due to the roles language and memory (or lack thereof) have played in my life, I have a healthy distrust for the presumed boundaries and definitions these systems are often relied on to imbue. Conversely, I am more interested in how to read the in-between spaces, the nuanced rhythms of textures, the slow currents of absences and silence, the long echoes of trauma and memory; and in allowing vulnerability and ambiguity to undergird understanding. I use hybrid poetic experimentation, fragmentation of both text and images, and multimodal forms of voicing, to subvert and question assumed paradigms, and re-form my own means of articulation and perception. I use music and sound as an oral/aural, embodied, non-intellectual path by which to evoke and (re)inhabit ethos, and nurture my own faculties of reception and listening. Through an art that requires the awakening and engaging of multiple sense perceptions, I believe there also lies potential to deepen our own sensitivities and empathies towards one another.
OPB Art Beat Profile (Nov, 2017): “Portland artist Dao Strom uses image, music, writing and spoken word to explore the intersection of her Vietnamese birth and American life.”
SELECTED PRESS
Podcast Interviews
The Archive Project @ Pickathon 2022: Dao Strom & Jon Raymond, with Anis Mogjani. Jon Raymond and Dao Strom discuss multidisciplinary writing and artistry with Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani at Pickathon music festival.
Between the Covers (Tin House Podcast): Dao Strom interviewed by David Naimon. 22 Aug 2018.
Reviews & Interviews
Poet Q&A: Dao Strom, winner of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Oregon ArtsWatch. May 2022.
Review for Redux album: “The Portland-based artist releases her wonderful second LP.” Sun 13. Apr 2022.
Interview: Dao Strom interviewed by Woogee Bae. Full Stop Magazine. Feb 2022.
Review: “Poetry, photography, sound and music fuse together in ‘Instrument’ by artist Dao Strom.” International Examiner. Jul 2021.
Interview: “On Excavation and Activating Ghosts In the Field: A Conversation Between Julian Saporiti and Dao Strom.” diaCRITICS. Jul 2021.
Interview: “Dao Strom and Brian Harnetty :: In Conversation.” Music Conversation. Aquarium Drunkard. Jun 2021.
Interview: “My Own Path of Hybridity.” Lamb, Meghan. Nat. Brut Magazine. Fall 2020.
Profile: “Meet Dao Strom, 2020 Oregon Literary Fellow.” Literary Arts Blog. Oct 2020.
Interview: “More Than Survival—A Conversation With Dao Strom.” Savage, Claudia S. About Place Journal. May 2020.
Review: You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else. Alessandrelli, Jeff. Hong Kong Review of Books. 19 Jan 2019.
Review: You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else. Lewis, Brigitte. Medium.com. 13 Nov 2018.
Interview: “Hybrid Inheritances: A Conversation with Dao Strom.” Palumbo-Liu, David. The Margins. 8 Nov 2018.
Interview: “Dao Strom In Conversation with Vi Khi Nao.” Aster(ix) Journal. 18 Feb 2018.
OPB Art Beat Profile: “Dao Strom’s Work Aims To Destabilize the American Vietnam Narrative.” Gilfillan, Jule. Oregon Public Broadcasting, Art Beat. 9 Nov 2017.
Interview: “Portland Writer Dao Strom Gives the Past a Soundtrack: We Were Meant to Be Gentle People Goes Above and Beyond Traditional Memoir.” Amberson, Joshua James. Portland Mercury. 3 Feb 2016.
Review: “Eric Nguyen Reviews Dao Strom’s We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People.” diaCRITICS. 14 Dec 2015.
Review: “Memory Problems: We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People.” Paige, Abby. LA Review of Books. 1 Dec 2015.
EVENT HIGHLIGHTS / PUBLICATIONS / EXHIBITIONS
2023
Music Performance, Show Bar, Portland, OR (opening for Maria BC)
Diaspora Songs Performance (with Julian Saporiti/No-No Boy), Sound Hall + Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Hyphens Lecture/Performance, Poetry/Music/Hybrid, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
2022
Winner of 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, for Instrument
Redux, 10-song album, Antiquated Future Records (cassette, digital)
Pickathon Festival, Poetry/Sung-Poetry Performance, Literary Lineup, Pendarvis Farm, Happy Valley, OR
Orcas Island Literary Festival, music performance + panels, Orcas Island, WA
Artist-In-Residence: Amy Marie Sears Memorial Visiting Artists Series, St. Catherine University. Teaching Residency + Music/Poetry Performance Event, Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, St. Paul, MN
Reverberating Bodies, solo art exhibit, Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, St. Paul, MN
2021
Instrument, Portland Book Festival, conversation event (with Alicia Jo Rabins), presented by Literary Arts, Portland’5 Brunish Theatre
A Quiet Transition: Lulling Voices, livestream concert via Experimental Sound Studio, curated by Bao Nguyen
Siren Nation Speaks Poetry Reading & Process Talk, with Endi Bogue-Hartigan, Michele Glazer, Dao Strom
2020
we breathe & breathing is (an) a|synchronous music, every body needs the air, poetry text-art installation, public artwork, Vanport Building, commissioned by Portland State University. (Vietnamese translation by Vi Khi Nao.)
Instrument/Traveler’s Ode, poetry collection + music album; publication and release by Fonograf Editions + Antiquated Future Records.
Instrument/Traveler’s Ode, poetry/music performance, visual poetry installation, Time-Based Art Festival (TBA:20), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR.
She Who Has No Master(s): Would That, Poetry/Art Solo Exhibit, George S. & Dolores Doré Eccles Art Gallery, Salt Lake Community College, Salt Lake City, UT.
2019
The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, four novellas collection, paperback reissue (with new preface and introduction), Counterpoint Press.
She Who Has No Master(s): Food, Memory, Mythology, Collective Poetry Performance, presented by Black Mountain Institute, East Las Vegas Library, Las Vegas, NV.
FODDER LIVE, Fonograf Editions Performance Event, curated by Jeff Alessandrelli, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, OR.
Traveler’s Ode, screening, Cadence Video Poetry Festival, curated by Poetry Northwest, NW Film Forum, Seattle, WA.
2018
You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, poetry-art collection, bilingual; pub. AJAR Press (Hanoi, USA).
“Dead Time”, international group exhibit, The Factory, curated by Emilie Dalum, collaboration with videographer Kyle Macdonald, Hotel Djúpavík, Westfjords, Iceland.
(dis)place. Curator; artist. Group photography exhibit with Roland Dahwen, Intisar Abioto, Vincent Trinh, Dao Strom, De-Canon Library, Milepost 5, Portland, OR.
De-Canon: A Visibility Project, collective project; co-facilitator: Neil Aitken, installation/residency, sponsored by Artists Milepost and APANO, Milepost 5, Portland, OR.
She Who Has No Master(s) Collective Poetry Performance, United States of Asian America Festival, presented by Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC), Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA.
2017
“Origin Tale” / “15m=?” Poetry Performance, curated by Samiya Bashir, video collaboration with Roland Dahwen, Time-Based Art Festival, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR.
De-Canon: A Visibility Project, collective project; co-facilitator: Neil Aitken, installation/residency, UNA Gallery, Portland, OR.
She Who Has No Master(s) Collective Poetry Performance, American Library in Paris, Paris, France.
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