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 awarded the CA Creative Corps Fellowship through California Arts Council in partnership with Arts Council of Long Beach, during which she will be working to develop self-reflective arts programming for the empowerment of young Khmer women in Long Beach. She continues to work with leading academic and arts institutions to engage the community in creative storytelling and to speak about her art practice. 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), Ruminate Magazine, 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), which was included on the list of The Best Books of Locally Writ in 2020 by The Spokesman Review (Spokane, WA). 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 artwork to further expound on the immigration policies that threaten the well-being of Asian American communities, and pronouncing the hope, the call, and the consistent prayer for freedom.

A pause in the studio

Seeking hope within humanity’s incessant struggle in war and hardship, she has partnered with Oceanside Museum of Art, MiraCosta College, Community Engagement, and Bowers Museum in developing fine art projects that engage survivors of war. In addition, she has worked with the San Diego Art Institute in producing interactive works that address the injustices that fuel fear and incite conflict within refugee communities, and with the International Rescue Committee in providing refugee youth from Africa, Mexico, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia with arts education and creative expression in honoring home, heritage, history, and heroism. Her artistic journey has been documented by Manoa Sky Films in the short film, Arise. Shine. Thy Light is Come., and by The Artist Odyssey in the film called Honoring Life: The Work of Trinh Mai, which brought home the Audience Choice Award for Best Short Film at the 2016 Viet Film Festival. 

With a faith on the potential of our young people, Mai has exhibited in support of Angkor Hospital for Children in Cambodia; has shown her work at Oracle Arena with the Golden State Warriors to aid the Warriors Community Foundation in its mission to support education in the San Francisco Bay Area; and has had the privilege of working with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to develop arts+science programming for the Friends of Huế Foundation Children's Shelter in Việt Nam.