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Arts Division
Film and Digital Media Department
MFA Student
Social Documentation
Graduate
Art Department
Em Butler is a writer, filmmaker and community organizer from Long Beach, California. Of Cambodian-English heritage and as a first-generation queer Khmer-American, her documentary and journalism work broadly center Southeast Asia and the potential for multigenerational storytelling to push forward global anti-imperialist movements. Her research approaches are situated between documentary, ethnography, and journalism, and performative fiction. Currently she is working on a docu-fiction film featuring her mother's first return to Cambodia after 43 years of separation. Alongside this film is an expansive research project that studies the developing cultures and livelihoods of Cambodians along waterways in California and in Cambodia, family performance as emotional processing, memory and global narrative, and engaged relationships through documentation.
Decolonial and Anti-imperialist Movements, Docu-Fiction, Participatory Research, Southeast Asian History, Language Discrepancies in Diasporic Storytelling, Familial Performance, Essay Film, Oral History
Introduction to Film Studies
Introduction to Media Theory
History of Television
Introduction to Documentary Film & Video
Film, Video and Gender
Silent Cinema
2023 SEACoast Junior Rearch Fund Award
2024 UCSC Grad Slam People's Choice Award Winner
2024 Florence J. French Award
2024 Ken Corday GROW Endowment Award
2024 UCI SEA Anne Frank Archive Research Award
2025 Dean's Arts Excellence and Equity Award
TILT + SHIFT / Indexical Screening - 2025
UCSC Grad Slam "Coming Home to Mango Orchards" - 2024
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