Amara Goel

Cambodian American classically trained soprano and founder and host of The Threaded Path, a podcast about Cambodian artists and memory.

Creator details
Roles	Musician
Subjects	Music & Sound; Migration & Diaspora; History & Remembrance

Amara Goel is a Cambodian American classically trained soprano and policy analyst who founded the podcast The Threaded Path. She grew up in Houston, Texas, and she describes herself as the first known Western classically trained soprano of Cambodian heritage.

Music and stage

Goel 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. Where Elephants Weep is a Cambodian American rock opera about Sam, a refugee from the Khmer Rouge genocide who sets out to find his roots in his native culture. Her EP Teuk Dey is about memory and longing among displaced Cambodians.

The Threaded Path

Goel founded and hosts The Threaded Path, a podcast and video series about Cambodian artists and cultural practitioners. It grew out of her part in Cambodian Living Arts' Acts of Memory, a global commemoration in 2025 of the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh. There she watched artists from around the world take part in remembrance and creative work together. Goel sees healing as an ongoing process of joining pieces of personal and shared experience.

Policy work

Goel holds a master's degree in Global Policy Studies from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. She has researched and written for World Vision on global hunger and the crises in Sudan. She works as a monitoring and evaluation consultant for the International Labour Organization on efforts to end child labor and forced labor. She presents her work under the heading "From Stage to Strategy," and her writing, performance and policy work address cultural healing and the legacy of the Khmer Rouge.

Interviews

In June 2025 Goel was a guest on Death in Cambodia, Life in America. She spoke about growing up as a 1.5-generation immigrant, a path that ran from refugee camps to international stages and global policy work, and about how little the Khmer Rouge era is taught in the United States.

Works

• The Threaded Path (Publication)

Appears in

• Fonki: The Ancestral Echoes of Painting on Walls (The Threaded Path, September 2026)
• Chef Nak: Food is Just a Hook (The Threaded Path, September 2026)

See also

• The Threaded Path
• Death in Cambodia, Life in America
• Cambodian Living Arts
• All creators

References