Kalyanee Mam

Award-winning filmmaker, lawyer and born storyteller, Kalyanee Mam, is committed to combining her passion for art and advocacy to tell compelling and universal stories. Born in Battambang, Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge Regime, she and her family fled to the refugee camps at the Thai-Cambodian border and eventually immigrated to the United States in 1981.

In her most recent film, A River Changes Course, Kalyanee returned to her native homeland to capture the stories of three families living in Cambodia as they strive to maintain their traditional ways of life amid rapid development and environmental degradation.

The film won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Gate Award for Best Feature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Kalyanee has also worked on 2011 Oscar-winning documentary, Inside Job, about the global financial crisis and documentary short Between Earth & Sky about three young Iraqi refugee artists living in Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. A graduate of Yale University and UCLA Law School, Kalyanee also worked as a legal consultant in Mozambique and Iraq.