Sochietah Ung

Sochietah Ung is a Cambodian-born dancer, choreographer, and master costume and crown maker who rebuilt classical Khmer performance traditions after the Khmer Rouge genocide. Growing up in Cambodia, Ung attended classical theatre with his grandmother and committed movement and costume details to memory—knowledge that would later become essential to his survival and vocation. During the Khmer Rouge rule from 1975 to 1979, Ung endured forced labor and lost his family; he was the only member of his family to survive. He escaped through Thai refugee camps and resettled in the Washington, D.C., area around 1979.

In the early 1980s, Cambodian dancers preparing performances learned of Ung's detailed theatrical knowledge. He first advised on costumes, then began making them and dancing. He studied with master teachers including Phuong Phan, Moly Sam, Sam-Ouen Tes, Chea Samy, Sok Samon, and Neak Kru Leas, both in the diaspora and through Cambodia-based instruction. His practice grew across linked disciplines: he became a leading teacher of three major Cambodian classical roles—giant, male, and female—while also teaching folk dances, choreographing, writing and directing theatre, and creating the crowns, masks, jewelry, and costumes that define character and cosmology onstage.

Ung's crowns became sought after across the United States and Cambodia. During a 1985 United States tour, Princess Norodom Buppha Devi of Cambodia's Royal Dance Troupe wore one of his crowns, affirming his mastery as a maker. He later created crowns for a Broadway production of *The King and I*. These commissions demonstrate both the technical precision of his work and the role diaspora artists played in rebuilding the material knowledge needed for staged dance.

Teaching is the center of Ung's practice. He has transmitted dance and costume making to hundreds of students and performed at the Kennedy Center, Smithsonian museums, National Folk Festivals, and venues throughout the Washington region. In 2016 the Virginia Folklife Program recognized him as a master costume maker and engaged him as a master artist in its apprenticeship program, where he worked closely with apprentices Lena Ouk and Matthew Regan on costume and crown techniques. In 2024, Ung received an NEA National Heritage Fellowship, the United States government's highest honor in folk and traditional arts. The award recognized a life of preservation, reinvention, and community service—a testament to how cultural survival after mass violence depends on people who remember how movement, costume, ritual symbolism, theatre, and teaching fit together.