Charya Burt is an acclaimed master dancer, choreographer, vocalist, and teacher of Classical Cambodian Dance who has injected new life into the dance form by creating classically inspired, inventive new works. Her training began shortly after the Khmer Rouge genocide with the foremost surviving dance masters of Cambodia at the Royal University of Fine Arts, serving on the dance faculty there from 1989 to 1992. As a member of Cambodia’s Royal Dance Troupe Charya toured nationally and internationally. After emigrating in 1993, Burt has performed throughout the USA, including LA’s Getty Museum, the Kennedy Center, and the San Francisco Opera House. She has been featured countless times at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. Her original works have been presented by Jacob’s Pillow Festival, World Arts West, CounterPULSE, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and many others.

Among her numerous honors, Burt is an inaugural Dance/USA Fellow, a 2022 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellow for Artists Transforming Communities, and a recipient of the Isadora Duncan Award for Individual Performance. Center for Cultural Innovation and Creative Work Fund have each granted Burt multiple awards. Her work has been chronicled in KQED Arts, Cambodian’s Dark Past Behind Her, A Dancer Steps into the Light (2014), and the US Department of State’s A Living Legacy: Classical Cambodian Dance Thrives in California (2010). She has led collaborations with Indian, Japanese, and Central Asian dancers and has worked with innumerable established designers and musicians, including composers Chinary Ung and Vân-Ánh Võ.

Burt has devoted her life to reviving classical Cambodian dance by preserving authentic movements, gestures, and dances of the classical repertory, strengthening a sense of cultural identity for Cambodian Americans. A 5-time Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA) master artist awardee, Burt 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, Long Beach. In 2021, she received an ACTA Living Cultures grant to create the Charya Burt Cambodian Dance Digital Library.

In 2018, Burt premiered her full-length dance/theatre piece, Silenced, at CSU Long Beach, partnering with Khmer Arts Academy to explore how Cambodians are more defined by the Golden Age of the 1960s than the genocide that ended it. This production and her Children of the Refugees (2017) symbolize Burt’s work to help the Cambodian Diaspora heal by reconciling and co-existing with their dark past. Other choreographic works include Of Spirits Intertwined (2018), Heavenly Garden (2016), and Blossoming Antiquities: Rodin’s Encounter with the Celestial Dancers of Cambodia (2013). Burt’s upcoming premieres include Beautiful Dark in partnership with Mosaic America, exploring the socio-cultural impacts of colorism on immigrant communities of color, and The Rebirth of Apsara: Artistic Lineage, Cultural Resilience, and the Resurrection of Cambodian Arts from the Ashes of Genocide, her 2021 Hewlett 50 Arts commission exploring how traditional Cambodian Arts is ever evolving with four generations of multi-disciplinary Cambodian-American artists.

A true culture bearer, Burt’s mission is to continue to preserve and renew her art form, elevate the professionalism of community dance groups, and create innovative new works firmly rooted in tradition. She is the founding artistic director of Charya Burt Cambodian Dance, based in the San Francisco North Bay.

Narim Nam comes from a long family line of esteemed Cambodian classical dancers. Nam began her classical training at the age of nine. In 2004, she received her BA in Choreographic Arts from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She continued her studies at the Korean National University of Arts, graduating in 2009 with a Master’s Degree in Choreography. Narim’s performance experience both within Cambodia and abroad is extensive.

Nam is Deputy Director of the Department of Performing Arts, Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, and a Cambodian National Theatre Troupe member. She was a lead developer of the performing arts events for the 32nd SEA Games that were held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for the first time in 2023. As a senior artist at Amrita Performing Arts, Nam has performed in many new works, including as a featured dancer in Stravinsky’s Persephone directed by Peter Sellars at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Spain in 2019. Her choreographic works include The Shoes (2018) and Spirit (2017) for the annual China-Asian (Nanning) Theater Week and Behind My Dance (2017) for the Asian-Rok Arts Exchange in Manila, Philippines. In 2013, she was selected to participate in the young choreographers project in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. A highlight of her contemporary dance work came as a featured dancer in CRACK, an original work by German choreographer Arco Renz that was awarded the 2012 ZKB Patronage Prize in Zurich, Switzerland.

Rady Nget began his dance training in 1999, specializing in the monkey role of Lakhaon Kaol, the Cambodian classical male masked dance form. He has danced with Cambodia’s premiere contemporary dance company, the Amrita Performing Arts, since 2010. As a classical and contemporary dancer, Nget has toured to Europe, Asia, and the United States. In addition to performing in a broad range of contemporary productions, Nget has created a number of his own works, including a performance of his My Memory at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City in 2017. He was a featured dancer in CRACK – a new work of Cambodian contemporary dance by German choreographer Arco Renz, which was awarded the 2012 ZKB Patronage Prize in Switzerland in 2012.

Rady Nget obtained a Bachelor’s Degree of Arts from the Royal University of Fine Arts in 2013, where he is now a teacher at the Faculty of Choreographic Arts and Deputy Chief of Research. Nget is researching new ways of arts training for Cambodia’s next generation of performing artists, including establishing sustainable mentoring programs. In 2019, Nget became part of the Amrita Collective, Cambodia’s premiere contemporary dance collective. Nget has received many high profile grants, including a 2020 Cambodia Living Arts Commission to create Roots. This new dance work combines Cambodian classical dance, Mask Dance, Yike opera, folk dance, Bassac opera, and circus. In 2021, Nget created his own dance collective, Root Dance, to help inspire a new generation of Khmer Mask Dance practitioners. That year, he also received a grant from Cambodian Living Arts to create a new work he called SAKEE. A Southeast Asia Choreographers Network member, Nget creates dance works that bridge the classical with the contemporary.

Chanmoly Vuth has been a classical Cambodian dancer since she was a young child under the guidance of her mother and grandmother, both renowned classical Cambodian dance masters. After receiving her bachelor’s degree at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Directing of Art, Vuth became a professor of the Cambodian Royal Ballet for the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. She has performed at prestigious performance venues throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States, including The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC (2001 and 2009) and Cité de la Musique in Paris (2018). She is a master of three Cambodian Royal Ballet roles: male (narong), female (neang), and giant (yeak). She also has extensive experience performing folk and contemporary dance as well as acting for Lakhon Bassak, Lakohn Niyeay, and Lakhon Yike. In addition to her extensive resume as a dancer/performer, Vuth is also a producer for Cambodia’s Bayon Television and Radio.

“Louk Kru” Chinary Ung was born in Cambodia and spent his early childhood in Prey Lovea, a small village surrounded by rice paddies. His first exposure to Western classical music was as a teenager, and he was so drawn to it that he came to New York in 1964 to study clarinet performance (at the Manhattan School of Music) and, later, composition with Chou Wen-chung at Columbia University.

During the Cambodian genocide, where nearly 2 million people died, Ung feared that the country would lose its precious musical heritage because artists were targeted by the Khmer Rouge regime. He devoted himself to learning the roneat-ek, the Cambodian xylophone, and performing traditional pin peat music (the Cambodian gamelan ensemble) throughout the United States.

When Ung returned to composition in the mid-1980s, his music had achieved a unique synthesis between Avant-garde instrumental techniques, Western formal design, and Southeast Asian melodic figures. His first orchestral piece written in this period, Inner Voices, commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, won the coveted Grawemeyer Award, making Ung the first American and only Cambodian to win the award.

Since the early 2000s, his music has featured instrumental parts in which performers play their instruments while also vocalizing: singing, chanting, shouting, and whistling. This is, in part, a reference to Southeast Asian folk traditions, where it is common for performers to accompany themselves as they sing. Ung’s mentor, Chou Wen-chung surmised a spiritual dimension when he remarked that “subconsciously perhaps, he was trying to express in his music what a Buddhist would describe as two “vehicles,” one to be heard and one to be felt.”

Since 1995, Chinary Ung has served on the faculty at UC San Diego, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Music. In 2020, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Kalean Ung is an award-winning Cambodian-American multi-disciplinary theater artist. Her professional career ranges from Shakespeare to experimental theatre to contemporary opera and writing for the stage. She has performed at: The Kirk Douglas Theatre, Disney Hall, REDCAT, The Getty Villa, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Boston Court Pasadena, The Hammer Museum, The Actors’ Gang, among others. She has collaborated with critically-acclaimed theatre and opera companies including: Critical Mass Performance Group, The Industry, The LA Philharmonic, Long Beach Symphony, First Look Sonoma, Independent Shakespeare Company, Four Larks Theatre (Ovation Award), and CalArts’s Center for New Performance.

Kalean received the competitive California Arts Council Established Artist Fellowship for her artistic work spanning the last ten years as well as a lead acting award from Stage Raw for her work as Lady Macbeth in the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival. Her solo play Letters From Home (LFH) has had performances at Merrimack Repertory Theatre (four nominations including Best Solo Show from the Elliot Norton Awards in Boston), Independent Shakespeare Company, UC San Diego, Cambodia Town Film Festival, Willamette University, LA Mission College, UC Irvine, and a four-camera live-stream adaptation workshopped at Boston Court Pasadena. LFH has received support from the LA Department of Cultural Affairs, CalArts, and MAP Fund.

Kalean teaches in the Theater School at CalArts. She received her MFA in Acting from CalArts and her BM in Vocal Performance from UC Santa Cruz.

Paul Dresher is an internationally active composer and performing arts producer noted for his ability to integrate diverse musical influences into his own coherent and unique personal style. He pursues many forms of musical expression, including experimental opera/music theater, chamber and orchestral composition, live instrumental electro-acoustic music, musical instrument invention, and scores for theater and dance.

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition in 2006-07, he has received commissions from the Library of Congress, St. Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto Festival USA, the Kronos Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, Seattle Chamber Players, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, and Chamber Music America. He has performed or had his works performed throughout the world at venues including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, the Festival d ’Automne in Paris, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, and the Minnesota Opera.

Dresher has a life-long engagement with and passion for the performing arts of South and Southeast Asia, having lived and studied in the region in 1979-80. He has subsequently been invited to perform in and/or to collaborate with artists from India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Korea, and Cambodia.

Dresher founded and leads the non-profit performing arts organization New Performance Traditions (dba Paul Dresher Ensemble). Formed in 1984, this group commissions, performs, and tours a diverse repertory of new chamber works from a wide range of contemporary composers; produces and tours new opera/music theater productions; collaborates with dance and theater artists and organizations to create and perform new collaborative works; and mounts educational and family programs to bring its repertory to diverse audiences of all ages.

Dresher received his B.A. in Music from U.C. Berkeley and his M.A. in Composition from U.C. San Diego, where he studied with Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, and Bernard Rands. He has had a longtime interest in the music of Asia and Africa, studying Cambodian Pin-Peat ensemble music, Ghanaian drumming with C.K. and Kobla Ladzekpo, Hindustani classical music with Nikhil Banerjee, as well as Balinese and Javanese music.

Vân-Ánh Võ dedicates her life to creating music by blending the unique sounds of Vietnamese instruments with various music genres and fusing deeply rooted Vietnamese musical traditions with fresh new structures and compositions. Since settling in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001, Vân-Ánh has been focusing on collaborating with musicians across different styles, cultures, and genres to create new works, bringing Vietnamese traditional music to a broader audience and preserving her cultural legacy through teaching. Her music reimagines traditional music to contemporary forms, bridging the previous with the current while bringing Vietnamese art music to the next generation.

Vân-Ánh has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma, Southwest Chamber Music, Oakland Symphony, Monterey Symphony, and Alonzo King LINES Ballet. Additionally, she has co-composed and arranged for the Oscar® nominated and Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner for Best Documentary, Daughter from Danang (2002), the Emmy® Awards winning film and soundtrack for Bolinao 52 (2008), and A Village Called Versailles (2009). In addition to the zither (đàn Tranh), Vân-Ánh also performs as a soloist on the monochord (đàn Bầu), the bamboo xylophone (đàn T’rung), traditional drums (trống) and many other traditional instruments.

Joel Davel is a percussionist who combines his classical training with intimate knowledge and the use of electronic music resources to help realize his work and the work of other composers. Davel’s diverse career and influences range from traditional acoustic folk and classical music to jazz, to the highly experimental. He has been a Vân-Ánh Võ’s Blood Moon Orchestra member since 2020. A close collaborator with composer Paul Dresher, Davel is part of Dresher-Davel Invented Instrument Duo, Double Duo, and Electro-Acoustic Band, often creating work for dance and theater productions as well as premiering works of other composers.

Davel has composed and performed live for several dNaga dance productions and appeared in The California Shakespeare Theater, West Edge Opera, and South Coast Repertory theater productions. Other long-time performer-composer collaborators include Amy X Neuburg, Jack West, John Duykers, and Guillermo Galindo. As circuit board designer and a mentee of electronic music pioneer Don Buchla for over 20 years, Davel continues the design of electronic music instruments, including continued refinement and production of the Buchla Marimba Lumina — Davel’s signature instrument. The Marimba Lumina gives him expressive control by recognizing each of the four mallets independently while tracking the mallet’s location along each bar. Davel holds a Bachelor of Music from Northern Illinois University and an MFA from Mills College.

Susan Ung became interested in improvised and written new music in the late 1970s at Northern Illinois University while studying the viola and learning Chinese and Indonesian instruments. By 1980, Chinary Ung was collaborating and writing works for her, which has continued to evolve throughout the decades into more complex works involving vocalization and theater components. Her skill with vocalization while playing the viola is unique, including singing and whistling while playing different pitches and rhythms on the viola. It has been an integral part of the works they have created together. These works include Aura (for large chamber ensemble), Spiral XI (for solo viola/voice), Spiral XII (chamber ensemble with solo singers, chorus, and Cambodian dancers), Akasa (for pi-pa, viola, cello, and piano), Singing Inside Aura, (concerto for viola with chamber ensemble or chamber orchestra), and Therigata Inside Aura, (chamber ensemble and singers). Susan has performed at major festivals and venues throughout the U.S. and in New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, mainland China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines and Myanmar. She has recorded on many labels, including Summit, New World Records, CRI, Cambria, and a four-volume series on Bridge Records.

Costume Design San Vannary is the designer/owner of Lotus Silk Boutique and has been involved in efforts to revitalize the traditional Cambodian silk industry through a mulberry tree-growing project. In addition to her work in handicrafts and fashion, she has envisaged, designed, and implemented projects and trainings throughout rural parts of Cambodia regarding sustainable organic gardening, decentralized democracy, and sex and body awareness education. She holds degrees in management from the International Institute of Management and National University of Management and in English from Pannasastra University. In 2013, she was the costume designer for the Khmer Arts Ensemble’s A Bend in the River at Northrop, University of Minnesota. Vannary has received many awards for her work in the community, her entrepreneurship, and as a leader amongst Cambodian women – including Outstanding ASEAN Women Entrepreneur, The Award for Women’s Creativity in Rural Life from Women’s World Summit Foundation in 2012, and Top 5 Designer of the Year 2017 by the Modern Ethnic Design Centre.

Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh is a Taiwanese multimedia artist who is currently based in Los Angeles. Her practice includes experimental film, projection art, photography, and video installation across diverse mediums. As a projection designer, she collaborates with entertainment companies and theaters to create videos for live performances. Some notable collaborators and venues include NY Performa Biennial, Shanghai Oriental Art Center, The Ford Foundation, LATC, LA Contemporary Dance Company, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

David Robertson is a San Francisco-based designer. He has worked with many Bay Area companies, including the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, Post: Ballet, Opera Parallèle, The Paul Dresher Ensemble, Shotgun Players, The Magic Theatre, and SF Playhouse. As ODC Dance’s lighting director since 2003, he has toured with them extensively and created many original designs, including the 2019 design of KT Nelson’s site-specific piece Path of Miracles at Grace Cathedral. He has been the lighting designer for the Sun Valley Music Festival’s summer symphony season in Sun Valley, Idaho, since 2008.

Virginia Prak, originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, began her artistic journey at the age of 8, delving into the realm of Cambodian arts. With over 22 years of experience in traditional Cambodian classical and folk dance, she is a principal dancer, instructor, and former Angkor Dance Troupe board member. Professionally trained by esteemed Master Teacher Phousita Huy and many others from the Royal University of Fine Arts Phnom Penh, Virginia, has globally graced stages from the Philippines to Cambodia and France. Now a recent resident of Honolulu, HI, she continues to teach the local community and broaden her connections.

Reaksmey “Mea” Lath is a refugee with over two decades of Cambodian classical dance experience. Following the legacy of her master teachers, Charya Burt and Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, she founded the Modern Apsara Company in Long Beach, California, to preserve the sacred art form by teaching the next generation and performing in elevated spaces. Professionally, she has performed throughout the U.S. and with Charya Burt Cambodian Dance in many prestigious spaces such as Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Palace of Fine Arts, and others to showcase the beauty and resiliency of Cambodian culture. In 2022 she choreographed and performed “Birds of Angkor,” composed by Dr. Chinary Ung, for the Long Beach Symphony’s “Khmeraspora”. Mea’s passion is to bridge the diaspora to Cambodian heritage and elevate the quality and integrity of the art.

Ryan Boun first learned Cambodian dance with Neak Kru Savary Dean with the Cambodian Cultural Dance Troupe in San Jose and was later an Alliance for California Traditional Arts apprentice with Neak Kru Charya Burt. He has also studied Cambodian traditional music. His projects Beyond Borders: An Evening of Music From Battambang (2023) and 1975-2025: 50 Years Since the Fall of Phnom Penh (upcoming 2025), showcase the vitality of Cambodian traditional artists in the diaspora. He has been an instructor with San Jose’s Cambodian Cultural Dance Troupe for ten years and is the Creative Director of the Cambodian American Resource Agency.

Rob Burt, Executive Director of Charya Burt Cambodian Dance, is a theater director, producer, and educator. A theater teacher for over 35 years, he has directed and produced over 100 theatrical productions, many for his award-winning playwriting program at Elsie Allen High School in Santa Rosa, California. The school’s 350-seat theater was named in his honor in 2017. Burt’s many other honors include two outstanding educator awards from the California League of High Schools and the United States Presidential Scholars Teacher Recognition Award. While on paid sabbatical from 1990-1992, Burt taught graduate-level drama at Srinakharinwirot University in Thailand and playwriting at the University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, producing original plays with actors from Cambodia’s National Theatre. It was here that he met his future wife, Charya, who was on the university’s dance faculty. In 1993, he helped Charya establish her U.S. dance company and has been her creative partner ever since.