kieu tran

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: BLOOM

Kieu Tran is a first generation Vietnamese American artist based in Oakland, California. She creates elegant, sensuous, biomorphic ceramic sculptures that exist somewhere between the abstract and figurative. Kieu strives to give expression to emotion, to allow the aesthetic of the form to tell you something about the inspiration behind the piece on a wordless, instinctual level. She considers her sculptures to be an effort to give form to the human soul and to remind us of our shared humanity. 

Kieu obtained a bachelor’s degree in art history from UCLA in 2012 and has also studied art history while living in Italy and Germany, but was not making any art herself. Intrigued by Silicon Valley, she learned to code in 2014 and quickly became a software engineer within the year. She also developed a serious ceramic art practice around the same time alongside her tech career and eventually realized that she was always meant to be an artist. Kieu doesn’t have formal art training, but a lack of formal training didn’t stop her from breaking into tech either. No stranger to challenges and drastically changing her life, she officially quit tech in January of 2021 to pursue her passion of becoming a full time artist. Despite having only gone full-time at the beginning of 2021, her ceramic sculptures have since been received with excitement and she has cultivated a growing following of enthusiastic collectors.