Dao Strom

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. Born in Vietnam and based in Portland, OR, she is the author/composer of several hybrid literary/music works, including the poetry-art collection, Instrument, and its album companion of song-poems, Traveler’s Ode, among other books and albums. Her current project is Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs (2025), a song-cycle accompanied by a set of four hybrid-literary chapbooks. As a songwriter and composer, Dao has been exploring “diaspora songs” since the early 2000’s, when she first began infusing into the context of “Americana” folk/roots music her own diasporic Vietnamese experiences of displacement, postwar memories, and “folk” stories. Her music has since moved in more experimental directions, resisting easy categorization, drawing in ambient and ethereal elements, yet still maintaining tendrils of folk ethos. Dao’s work encompasses solo and collaborative projects, music/poetry performance, public art, visual-poetry installations, and has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, NEA, and others. She is also the co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese women writers & artists making polyvocal poetry-art works to enact a politics of connection, whose spoken-word voices feature in the song-poems of Tender Revolutions.