Photography is runs deep in my blood. In the 1980s, my mother and grandmother fled to Rochester, New York, as refugees of the Cambodian Genocide, which began just fifteen days after my mother’s seventh birthday in April 1975. My grandfather, a military officer under Prime Minister Lon Nol, was executed alongside much of our family. When liberation came, my mother carried with her the only surviving family photographs, smuggled through the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand. In the U.S., photography became her passion. From her personal archive, to my step-grandfather’s work at Eastman Kodak, to my great-great-grandfather’s view camera, photography has become an inheritance—of memory, resistance, and survival.

I am a Cambodian-American artist based in Providence, Rhode Island, home to one of the largest Cambodian communities in New England. My work explores photography, narrative history, and textiles as tools for historical reckoning and community building. As a descendant of survivors living in a period of cultural rebirth, I create to illuminate resilience in contemporary life, and to investigate memory, history, and intergenerational trauma.

Through an analog practice, I reclaim the weaponization of photography during the Genocide and resist the erasure of Cambodian heritage caused by war and colonialism, working with family photographs by re-staging, stitching, or transforming them into new visual forms. My practice is rooted in preservation—not only of images, but of lineage, stories, and cultural memory. My work is an offering—to my ancestors, to my community, and to future generations of Cambodians.