Maria Tran
Maria Tran is a community, cultural & development practitioner with celebrated skills in digital storytelling and film-making. Her writing skills have derived from scriptwriting for award-winning short films such as “Hit Girls”, “Hot Bread Shop” and “Happy Dent”, and playwriting. Maria has joined writing rooms for film and television. She was a creative producer for community projects such as “Vietnamese Stories; Digital Storytelling Project”, “Vietnamese Storycubes: Intergenerational Project” which lead to an exhibition called “Vietnamese Storyexchange”, through these projects anecdotal references were made by the elders of the “Trung Sister” story, yet the young people have never heard of such story growing up. Maria was awarded an In Other Words Residency by LOST IN BOOKS in 2018.
Artist Statement
As part of Maria Tran’s In Other Words residency, she explored a Vietnamese legend story of the Trung Sisters; female warriors who rose up to the occasion and fought against adversity 4,000 years ago. This story is very important to the Vietnamese culture as Trung Trac and Trung Nhi were the first female rulers in the world and become queens of Nanyue (Ancient Vietnam). The only surviving text of the exist lies in the Book of the Later Han, 5th century and she plans to create a Vietnamese/English Children's Bilingual Book working in consultation with the Vietnamese community in Australia and abroad.