Join us in San Francisco May 30 for an important program commemorating the Vietnam War and Cambodian genocide.

The program begins at 6, but arrive early, because from 5–6 p.m. we will be featuring a special pop-up exhibit in the lounge outside the auditorium. Then we'll have our panel discussion, a performance, and we'll wrap up the evening with a reception for all attendees.

Special Performer: Master Charya Burt

Charya Burt is an acclaimed master dancer, choreographer, vocalist and teacher of Classical Cambodian Dance. After the Khmer Rouge genocide, Burt trained extensively with Cambodia’s foremost surviving dance masters and toured internationally as a member of Cambodia’s Royal Dance Troupe. Before emigrating to the United States in 1993 she was a dance instructor at Cambodia’s Royal University of Fine Arts. Burt has devoted her life to reviving classical Cambodian dance through preserving authentic movements, gestures and dances of the classical repertory, thus helping to strengthen a sense of cultural identity for Cambodian-Americans. She has trained thousands of dance students throughout California, including multiple stints as artist-in-residence at Cambodian cultural centers in Stockton, San Jose, and Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach.

An inaugural Dance/USA and 2022 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellow and Isadora Duncan Award recipient for Individual Performance, Burt has received multiple grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Creative Work Fund, and Alliance for California Traditional Arts, including their Living Cultures Grant (2021) to create the Charya Burt Cambodian Dance Digital Library. A Hewlett 50 Arts Commission was awarded to her in 2021 to create The Rebirth of Apsara: Artistic Lineage, Cultural Resilience and the Resurrection of Cambodian Arts from the Ashes of Genocide, which premiered at Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center in 2024. In 2025 she premiered an adaptation of that work, The Rebirth of Apsara: Beyond Genocide, at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center to observe the 50th anniversary of the Cambodian Genocide. A true culture bearer, Burt has conducted workshops at schools and colleges around the country.

Burt has performed her original works throughout the nation at venues including Jacob’s Pillow, San Francisco Opera House, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and many others.  Her recent choreographic works include Beautiful Dark (2024) about the relationship between colorism and perceptions of beauty, Silenced (2018), Of Spirits Intertwined (2018), and Heavenly Garden (2016). Burt’s mission is to continue to preserve and renew her art-form, elevate the professionalism of community dance groups, and to create innovative new works firmly rooted in tradition. She is founding artistic director of Charya Burt Cambodian Dance, based in the San Francisco North Bay.

Panelists

Dr. Sondra Roeuny: The proud daughter of Khmer Rouge genocide survivors, Sondra Roeuny's life and work are guided by her family's resilience and her own journey as the first in her family to receive formal education.

Roeuny's profound commitment to equity and justice drives her work to build a more inclusive world by strengthening educational and economic opportunities and expanding access to healthcare. In fact, her dedication to educational equity began early; at UC Berkeley, she co-founded the first Southeast Asian Student Coalition, a student organization committed to advocating for and serving the needs of the Southeast Asian American community. Roeuny's advocacy also extends to working on policy changes in immigration, reproductive justice, and climate justice, to name a few. In addition, she has led statewide efforts to help recruit and train diverse Democratic women and nonbinary leaders to run for office—and win—along with working to protect and expand access to a broad spectrum of reproductive health care, including abortion care.

A Stockton native, with deep ties to the Cambodian refugee community, Sondra finds inspiration in exploring ancient temples, particularly in Belize, Guatemala, and her ancestral homeland, Cambodia. Roeuny holds an Ed.D. and M.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she excelled in the Chief Learning Officer Program in Leadership and Learning. She also holds a Master's degree from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, specializing in public policy, with a particular focus on internal and financial management. Her academic journey began with a bachelor's degree in social welfare, which she earned with high honors from the University of California at Berkeley.

Sourichanh Chanthyasack: Sourichanh "Sirch" Chanthyasack was born in Vientiane, Kingdom of Laos and came to the United States in upper New York at the age of 7 with his family after 14 months in Nong Khai Refugee Camp in the Isan Region of Northeast Thailand, an area with over 22+ million Lao people. He has led national and local community advocacy and organizing for more than two decades. Sirch served as executive director of the Laotian American National Alliance (LANA) for a decade, co-founded and led the San Francisco International Lao New Year Festival (ILNYF) in the Civic Center & United Nations Plazas from 2009–2019, and since 2011 co-founded and co-chairs the Southeast Asian Arts & Culture Coalition. Sirch worked for San Francisco Recreation & Parks from 2015–2024 and was the Parks and Youth Voice Program Manager at the Tenderloin Community Benefit District from 2023–2024, created the highly successful free drop-in programs Soccer Fridays at the Tenderloin Recreation Center and Girls Night Friday, a weekly safe space for neighborhood moms and their children. Sirch is currently with SFUSD as the community school coordinator at Rosa Parks Elementary School in District 5 Western Addition: The Fillmore/Japantown.

Nkauj lab Yang: Nkauj Iab Yang is a daughter of Hmong refugees from Laos. She is the youngest of six. Nkauj Iab grew up in North Sacramento. She has served the community for more than two decades through youth and community organizing, as well as advocating to transform local and state policies. She's worked with organizations including Youth Together, Banteay Srei, Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, and Hmong Innovating Politics, leading youth organizing and statewide advocacy. She was the first executive director for the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs, where she successfully worked in partnership with the AAPILC to secure the initial $166.5 million for the AAPI Equity Budget in in 2021, and partnered with the California Senate to secure on-going state funds of $16 million to create and support the California AANHPI Student Achievement Programs at both the Community College of California and California State University systems. Today, Nkauj Iab works side by side with individual leaders and organizations, using her heart to guide, as she continues her journey to contribute to a place of curiosity, knowing, love, kindness, abundance, and belonging for underserved and underrepresented communities and inspire positive social and racial justice.

Dr. Isabelle Thuy Pelaud: Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a professor in the Asian American Studies department at San Francisco State University. She is the author of This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature and the co-editor of Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora  and of The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. She is the co-founder and executive director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN.org).

Khatharya Um: Associate dean of social sciences, and associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, she is an affiliated faculty of Berkeley Global Studies, the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, the Asian American Research Center, the Institute for European Studies, and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. A refugee from Cambodia, Professor Um is the first Cambodian American woman to receive a Ph.D., and the first Cambodian to join the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. 

Professor Um received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was also the Chancellor’s Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow. Her scholarship centers on Southeast Asia and Asian diaspora studies, migration and critical refugee studies, postcolonial studies, genocide studies, peace and conflict studies, and the politics of memory. An internationally acclaimed scholar, her groundbreaking research illuminates the global impact of war, genocide and forced migration. Her scholarship, especially on educational disparity, has informed policies and programs designed to promote the advancement of refugee and language minority students. Her current project involves the documentation and preservation of oral histories and local memories of pre-war Cambodia.

Through her teaching and pioneering scholarship, she was instrumental in building Southeast Asian American Studies and critical refugee studies at Berkeley and has contributed significantly to their growth nationally and internationally. She also spearheaded the establishment of the Asian American Research Center at Berkeley.  For her intellectual and institutional contributions, she was awarded the highly prestigious Fukuoka Academic Laureate Prize in 2023 and the Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and Equity in 2019.