សំសុភ័ក្រ Sopheak Sam (b. Thai-Cambodia border) is a U.S. Fulbright scholar whose research-driven practice traces cultural hybridity, queer alterity, and the historicization of the Khmer experience. Their multidisciplinary work meditates on ornamentalism, postwar memory and inheritance, Buddhist melancholia, and film/media archives as source materials across Cambodia and Cambodian diasporas to arrive at sites of pleasure and pain. 

Sam is currently the recipient of the 2022-2023 Fulbright Student Research Grant to Thailand, and was awarded the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship in 2017 to pursue studies at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. Sam has exhibited work at the Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, MN), Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, Distillery Gallery, Godine Family Gallery, Midway Gallery, Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery (Boston, MA), Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA), Dreitzer Gallery (Waltham, MA), and the Grace and Clark Fyfe Gallery (Glasgow, Scotland), among others. They recently completed a post-baccalaureate certificate in Studio Art at Brandeis University, and graduated with their BFA in Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Sam is an upcoming Visiting Researcher in the Department of Media Arts and Design at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. Sam is a naturalized American citizen of ethnic Khmer descent who was born on the Thai-Cambodian border. They grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts (ancestral Pennacook and Pawtucket land) where Sam currently resides and works.