Biography
Sopheak Sam (he/they) is a Cambodian-American queer artist, writer, and researcher whose sensuous and spatial interventions distill postwar intimacies. Their expansive practice traces the afterlives and afterimages of refugeehood to grapple with fragmentary memories, histories, and spaces.Often taking shape as room-scale, mixed media installations, their interdisciplinary work incorporates painting, sculpture, video, textiles, bookmaking, writing, and ephemera. Their research is autoethnographic and informed by decolonial methodologies at the interstices of affect and trauma theory (particularly in relation to materiality, temporality, and embodiment), queer theory, critical refugee studies, new media, and vernacular Buddhism. Their research inquiry reframes how we might view queer/Asian/diaspora within multiple entangled intellectual genealogies, political formations, and relational socialities.
Sam received the Artadia Award (Boston, 2025), a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant (2026), US Fulbright Research Scholarship (Thailand, 2022-23), Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships (Khmer/Cambodia, 2024-25), Cornell Council for the Arts Grants, the Helen Swank Research Fellowship (2024), the John Hartell Graduate Award for Art (2023), and has exhibited across the US, UK, and Southeast Asia. Sam holds an MFA from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.
Sam’s family arrived in the US in 1992 as sponsored refugees. They grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts* (a post-industrial city outside of Boston), attended Lowell Public Schools, and is the second-youngest of nine siblings. Their paternal grandmother was indigenous Khmer Krom (người Khmer Nam Bộ).
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