Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton is a Lao American interdisciplinary visual artist and Painting Professor at Middle Tennessee State University. Recently exhibited internationally in Italy and Greece and nationally at The Knoxville Museum of Art and Susquehanna Art Museum. She has been featured in The New Art Examiner, The Next-Door Neighbor, and various podcasts. Permanent collections include the Hunter Museum of American Art and the American Embassy, Paramaribo, Suriname. Houghton earned her BFA at the University of Kansas and an MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, IL. In 2023, she won Best in Show for the 38th Positive/Negative Exhibition, 2022 awarded a Tri-Star Current Art Warhol Foundation Fund and a MTSU's 2024 CUSA Faculty Achievement Award and 2022 Distinguished Creative and Teacher of the Year Award, 2020 nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Arts Award, a 2019 Artfield’s' Painting Award, and 2017 Tennessee Arts Individual Artist Fellowship recipient. She is represented by Tinney Contemporary Gallery in Nashville, TN.

"Sisavanh Phouthavong-Houghton is one of the first professional Lao American visual artists and educators of her generation. Over 7,200 Lao refugees resettled in Tennessee in the aftermath of the Laotian Civil War that ended in 1975. Through her powerful acrylic work, she confronts the challenges of bicultural memory and documentation. She considers notions of the abstract and the concrete for those who must remember both their inner and external histories in a diaspora framed by secrecy and loss. Her work probes what is shared, what is felt, and what must remain deeply personal among the lessons passed on to the next generation as it heals and rebuilds." - Brian Thao Worra: Poet, Writer, Curator, and advocator for the Laotian Community

This new body of work is inspired by the organization Legacies of War (legaciesofwar.org). Their mission statement: "is to raise awareness about the history of the Vietnam War-era bombing in Laos and advocate for the clearance of unexploded bombs, to provide a space for healing the wounds of war, and to create greater hope for a future of peace." As a refugee, the process of connecting and disconnecting with a place or community are abstracted ideas of migration as an immigrant. The collage and painting process is unpredictable and is an ongoing dialogue about assimilating and relocating into another culture and space. The work capture and embrace architecture and built environment in its state of flux. Teetering between realism and abstraction, I fold space and time to connect with the fleeting world. To achieve a kaleidoscopic effect, I employ multiple viewpoints, rhythmic fragmentation, and strong color contrast to fuse both the contemporary and historical landscape elements into one.