"Vietnamese-American artist Dao Strom has created an all-encompassing experience with her poetry work Instrument, which is accompanied by its companion piece, an album by the name of Traveler’s Ode. Within, there is an exploration of history, legacy, nature, of trauma both personal and generational, and the interwoven story of a member of a diaspora traveling back to a so-called homeland. Though what this actually means and how it plays out is investigated and dissected throughout."

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, (Hanoi: AJAR, 2018), a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song-cycle, East/West, and two books of fiction. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship. She has received support from RACC, Precipice Fund, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others.