This paper proposes an improved direct power control (DPC) strategy of grid-connected wind-turbine-driven doubly fed induction generators (DFIGs) when the grid voltage is unbalanced. The DPC scheme is based on the sliding mode control (SMC) approach, which directly regulates the instantaneous active and reactive powers in the stator stationary reference frame without the requirement of either synchronous coordinate transformation or phase angle tracking of grid voltage. The behavior of DFIGs by the conventional SMC-DPC, which takes no negative-sequence voltage into consideration, is analyzed under unbalanced grid voltage conditions. A novel power compensation method is proposed for the SMC-based DPC during network unbalance to achieve three selective control targets, i.e., obtaining sinusoidal and symmetrical stator current, removing stator interchanging reactive power ripples and canceling stator output active power oscillations, respectively. The active and reactive power compensation components are calculated via a simple method and the proposed three control targets can be achieved, respectively, without the need of extracting negative-sequence stator current components. Experimental results on a 2kW DFIG prototype are presented to verify the correctness and validity of the proposed control strategy and power compensation method.