Mei-ling Hom is an artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Allegany County, New York.   Her artistic explorations are nature based and range from the global interpretations of clouds, to most recently an exploration of soil microbes  and related microbial environments which impact our  lives so widely.

Mei-ling Hom received a BA degree in Ceramic Sculpture from Kirkland College (1973) and an MFA in Sculpture from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University (1987). She has garnered numerous prestigious awards such as the Pew Fellowship in Visual Arts (1998), an NEA Visual Artist Fellowship (1994), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Visual Artist Grant (2005), a Fulbright Research Fellowship to South Korea (2007) and the BigCi Environmental Residency Award in Australia (2018). Her commissioned installation at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute (2005) entitled Floating Mountains Singing Clouds was the first such commission for an Asian American. Her large-scale public art commissions include the Pennsylvania Convention Center (1994), the Philadelphia International Airport (2010), the Raleigh Durham International Airport (2011) and the Live Hotel Casino in Baltimore, Md(2018).

Other residency and fellowship opportunities include the Environmental Award Residency at BigCi Arts Center in NSW, Australia (2018), the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans (2013, 2016); the McColl Center for Art + Innovation Residency (2015);   the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest  Artist Residency (2014); a Fulbright Fellowship to Korea (2007-08), Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Umbria, Italy (2002); a US/Japan Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship in Japan (1996); a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Arts International Residency in Thailand (1992); two Cite Internationale Des Arts residencies in Paris, France (1989,1992); and a Headlands Center for the Arts  Residency in California(1990, 1993); among others.

She has also been in demand for commissioned works, and guest lectures including her commissioned ChinaWedge installation at the Pennsylvania Convention Center; as an invited artist in Dialogues with Asian American Artists at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; as a College Art Association panelist speaking on Public Art; and as a guest lecturer at these venues: Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, the Tokyo School of Art in Japan, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and the Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

Since 2010 her work has brought together her interests in both farming and artmaking. By combining art making with healthy soil, Mei-ling Hom explores ways to place sculptures in the landscape as biodegradable soil amendments. A 2013 residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans produced woven straw sculptures inoculated with oyster mushrooms. These sculptures produced an edible food and over time biodegraded into a beneficial soil amendment. As artist in residence at the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Clermont, Kentucky her straw sculptures for the Edible Garden were inoculated with endo mycorrhizal fungi to boost the growth of the vascular plants. In 2015/16  she was Environmental Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation in Charlotte, North Carolina. Working with David McClelland, she created a mycofiltration installation of mycelia innoculated straw sculptures sited on the creekside of Anita Stroud Park in Charlotte. The myceliated sculptures were installed to filter out bacteria, excess nitrogen, phosphorous, and hydrocarbons from runoff water. In the Spring of 2016, Mei-ling Hom was again in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. During this residency she and David McClelland developed a new crop initiative for the VEGGI Farmers' Cooperative in East New Orleans. Working with the Vietnamese farming community they introduced tea as a sustainable, local crop. The young tea plants were housed in a structure designed to double as a nursery for the tea and a resting place for the farmers. In 2017 she was recipient of the Environmental Artist Residency at the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. In 2018 she and David McClelland as the collaborative team of Art2Grow won Australia's Environmental Award and Artist Residency at the BigCi Art Center in New South Wales. During this residency they researched, designed and built a native flora garden for BigCi.