Her work has been featured in The Wall Street International, Click_Bait, Create Magazine, Studio Visit Magazine, The Tennessean, The Pinch Journal Publication, Voices of America, and The Next Door Neighbor. Permanent collections include Hunter Museum of American Art, American Embassy, Paramaribo, Suriname; Legacies of War Office, Washington, D.C.; Tennessee State Museum; Pinnacle Bank, Memphis, and Nashville, TN. Houghton earned her BFA from the University of Kansas and her MFA at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL. She is a recipient of the 2017 Tennessee Arts Individual Artist Fellowship for 2D and the 2019 Artfield's winner for the category painting. Sisavanh lives and works at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and a Professor of Painting at Middle Tennessee State University. She has lead community art projects with non-profit organizations such as SEAD (South East Asian Diaspora), Legacies of War, The Frist Art Museum, Oasis Center, and CRIT, Center for Refugees+Immigrants of Tennessee. She is represented by Tinney Contemporary Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sisavanh Phouthavong is one of the first professional Lao American visual artists and educators of her generation. Over 5,400 Lao refugees resettled in Kansas 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.