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Title
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Amy Lee Sanford
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Description
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Amy Lee Sanford is a Cambodian-American sculptor and performance artist who uses her work to explore the intersection of trauma and healing. She was raised in the United States by her Swedish-American mother and gained a degree from Brown University in Visual Arts specializing in biology and engineering. Sanford also studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth and Harvard University. She has art all over the world in places like Munich, Amsterdam, UC Santa Barbara, Australia and Denmark (Sanford 2019). Her father disappeared in 1975 after being imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge, and her mother passed away suddenly when Sanford was fifteen (selfportraitsofcolor 2018).
This work featured above is an image from a clip titled Cascade which is an 11 minute video from 2014. The work was displayed at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in New South Wales, Australia (Sanford 2019). In this work Sanford moves around pieces of a reproduced letter from her father who was persecuted and killed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge (Lyno 2025). She uses the pieces as a metaphor for the elusive process of reconstructing personal historical narratives (Lyno 2025). As she rearranges and assorts the pieces, we can see how complicated the idea of personal history can be and that there really isn’t a singular definitive history for one person (Lyno 2025). Cascade is similar to her other works where she engages in an approach of breaking and repairing, which is meant to represent the process of trauma and healing (Stranger 2015). This can be seen in a similar work, Full Circle in which she systematically broke and mended Cambodian clay pots over multiple days to symbolize cycles of destruction and restoration (selfportraitsofcolor 2018). Overall, Cascade serves as a space where personal history intersects with broader themes of cultural displacement, the reconstruction of memories, and resilience.
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Alternative Title
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Cascade(2014)
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Source
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Lyno, Vuth. 2025. “Traversing Expanses: The Cambodian-American Diaspora Experience in the Work of Pete Pin, Amy Lee Sanford, and Seoun Som.” The Trans-Asia Photography Review 5 (1). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0005.109.
Sanford , Amy . 2019. “Amy Lee Sanford – Visual Artist.” Amyleesanford.com. 2019. https://amyleesanford.com.
selfportraitsofcolor. 2018. “Self-Portraits of Color.” Tumblr. July 25, 2018. https://selfportraitsofcolor.tumblr.com/post/176266015919/amy-lee-sanford-b-usa-1972-full-circle-cambodia?.
Stranger , Lucy . 2015. “Amy Lee Sanford: Cascade - Artist Profile.” Artist Profile. November 26, 2015. https://artistprofile.com.au/amy-lee-sanford/.
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Name
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Kirin Lennon
