Mary Ellen Strom is an artist, known for her temporary public artworks and video/performance installations.  She is a Professor of the Practice at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., 1999-present. She was born in Butte, Montana, a hard rock mining town in the Rocky Mountain West. Her research-based artwork and fieldwork is influenced by the cultural and environmental concerns she experienced growing up in this complex region. Strom’s artworks about place, study the impacts of settler colonialism, extraction and human-induced climate change. Her projects have been created using methods of collective inquiry, and are researched and produced in collaboration with activists, Indigenous scholars, scientists, historians, environmentalists, and policy makers. These projects have been exhibited on farms, cattle ranches, public pools, on rivers, on trains, grain terminals, horse arenas in galleries and museums. Her artworks’ subjects have most recently focused on segregated recreation, restoring Indigenous histories, the Land Back movement, draught, fire, water and returning place names to Indigenous names.

Strom’s work has been exhibited at MoCA, LA; MoMA, NYC; ICA, Philadelphia; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; MFA, Boston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Pompidou Centre-Metz, Paris; Satouchi Trienniale, Japan; Hayward Gallery, London; Nagoya Museum of Fine Arts, Japan; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Awards include: International Fulbright Scholar Fellowship, Creative Capital, Artadia, the MAP Fund, Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Art and National Endowment for the Arts.

 Strom is a co-founder of the public art organization Mountain Time Arts is Southwestern Montana.