Amara Goel was born in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border after the fall of the Khmer rouge regime. Her family resettled in Houston, Texas, where she grew up. As the first known Western classically trained soprano with Cambodian heritage, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Voice from the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston. She has appeared in Where Elephants Weep, Sun and Sea, and Winds of Angkor. She also released Teuk Dey, an EP that explores themes of memory and yearning as displaced Cambodians. Amara is passionate about harnessing the power of arts to affect meaningful social change. With a Master’s in Global Policy Studies from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas Austin, she has worked as researcher and writer for World Vision on the global hunger crisis and the Sudan crises. Currently, she is the monitoring and evaluation consultant at the United Nations International Labour Organization working on the eradication of child labour and forced labour.