Trinh Mai is a second-generation Vietnamese American visual artist who examines the refugee and immigrant experience, then and now. Through a vast breath of media, she helps tell the stories of we, the enduring People, while focusing on our witnessing of war, the wounds we’ve survived, our collective need to heal, the longsuffering hope that carries us through deep waters, and the custodial responsibility to which we are heirs.

As a California-based interdisciplinary artist whose work is driven by innovative narratives of storytelling, her artistic creations re-imagine personal and inherited memories, family roots, and spiritual connections that alter conceptions of our identities and shared histories. Since receiving her BFA in Pictorial Art from San José State University and furthering her studies at UCLA, Mai has continued exhibiting with works taking residence in public and private collections internationally. Mai’s passion for intermixing arts and collaboration has inspired her community involvement. She has served in various roles, including Project Director for the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association, Course Developer for the Pacific Symphony, and Curator at the San José Center for the Performing Arts. She has also held residencies with the University of California Irvine’s Vietnamese American Oral History Project to bring a visual arts language to help tell the stories of Vietnamese America, and with Community Engagement in partnership with Grand Central Art Center to develop self-reflective visual arts programming for underrepresented communities in Santa Ana. Mai has collaborated with MCLA Arts & Culture to engage the public in conversations that address immigration, detention, deportation, and the poverty, violence, and the injustices that uproot families all over the world, as they look to a life that begins anew. Her work has been supported by numerous educational and cultural institutions including the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Harvard’s Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities with support from the Committees on History & Literature, and Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity to speak on how the war in Việt Nam and the resilience of our people continues to affect generations of Vietnamese Americans in present day.

Mai was named University of Washington’s Walker-Ames Guest Scholar in 2019, awarded the Long Beach Professional Artist Fellowship in 2021, and was commissioned in 2022 as inaugural muralist for the newly renovated wing of Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport, where she created her largest painting to date—a 185-foot mural that speaks on migration and freedom. In 2023, she was named a California Creative Corps Fellow, during which she developed arts programming with Khmer Girls in Action for the empowerment of young Cambodian women in Long Beach, and in 2024, was awarded the Visiting Mellon Practitioner Fellowship at Brown University. Her visual art, poetry, and analyses of her work have appeared in various publications including Fast Company Magazine, the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement (Purdue University), Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (University of Chicago Press), Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (Duke University Press), Wasafiri Magazine (London), the Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies (Yale University), and in the collaborative book of poetry and art, Atomic Theory 7 : Poems to My Wife and God (Resource Publications) with Poet Shann Ray. In 2019, the Asian American Law Journal (Berkeley Law) included artwork in their pages for the first time since its inception in 1993, publishing her art to further expound on the immigration policies that threaten the well-being of Asian American communities to pronounce the hope, the call, and the consistent prayer for freedom.