Isola Tong (b. October 10, 1987, Pasay City, Philippines) works in architecture, sound, photography, performance, video, publishing, and installation focusing on counter-memory that involves socially engaged methods, ecopoetics, and pedagogy. She currently lives and works in Santa Cruz, California. Her intersectional practice involves themes of postcolonial identity, transfeminism, animism, mythology, nature, violence, and hauntings through the lens of a subaltern trans-Pinay, herself haunted by the horrors of Philippine history, eco-colonial violence, and displacement. She is currently inspired by nests both as a metaphor and material evidence of interconnectedness, migration, and the process of change–a process in which birds weave together organic materials and e-waste showing the precarity of the boundary between human, animal, and vegetal agencies.

Tong's work primarily interrogates the complexity of how marginal identities and non-human agents are implicated and constituted in culture and power relations. She dissects current conjunctures intersectionally and politically which involves thinking about sociality across species, gender, race, scales, geographies, and hauntings to conjure counter-hegemonic possibilities. Her art-making process consists of archival research, documentation, collecting, community work, image, and sound experiments. This is important to understanding her work because her process is in conversation with a specific context, ecology, and history that reveals tensions between worlds and differences.

She has shown in Post-Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, South Korea, Sami Center for Contemporary Art, Tromso, Norway, A+ Contemporary Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia, UP Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines. She is currently an MFA candidate at the UC Santa Cruz, Environmental Art and Social Practice program.