Alissa Teo arranges colored rice into portraits, tosses them into the air and films the split second the image holds together before it shatters.
She does it all from a corner of her Flower Mound backyard, with a single tripod and her cellphone.
That simple setup has drawn nearly 4 million followers on TikTok and more than 2 million YouTube subscribers to her business, Fried Rice Art, KERA News reported on Wednesday, Sept. 16. Brand commissions have followed from Crayola, ESPN, FIFA and Lego. A Denton Record-Chronicle profile showed one of her pieces for a Disney project: Tow Mater from the film "Cars," rendered entirely in rice.
A golden YouTube trophy sits on her office desk. It marks 1 million subscribers.
Teo, a mother of three and former occupational therapist, launched Fried Rice Art in 2021. She left her therapy career when her middle child began experiencing health complications, according to KERA News. The family's time at home led her back to a familiar tool from her clinical work: rice.
"With my background of [occupational therapy] rice was always something that could be used as a sensory experience," Teo told KERA News. "We were dying it together. We were playing with it. And that was something, it was just something small that just gave joy to my kids and I during that time."
Her sister persuaded her to post the results on TikTok. Teo said she went to sleep and woke up to millions of views.
The process behind each piece is painstaking. Teo uses tweezers and rulers to place individual grains within a tracing of the design, pulling dyes from a shelf of multicolored bottles at her work table. She stores her rice supply in white bins originally meant for pet food. Most nights, she starts after her children go to bed around 9 or 10 p.m. and works until 3 or 4 a.m.
Teo also puts leftover rice to use closer to home. She creates sensory bins, containers filled with tactile material, for local children. The bins help children develop cognitive skills and stimulate senses like touch, drawing on her occupational therapy training.
Residents can find Fried Rice Art on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook under @friedriceart.
Upcoming in Flower Mound and Highland Village:
- Oct. 2 — Free flu shots in Flower Mound
- Nov. 11 — Highland Village veterans luncheon (sponsors still needed)
