Connection and Community Recognition
What's been happening at Epic Arts
September was a month of recognition and reach. Our CEO Sokny was named an ISPA Global Fellow 2027, joining 55 arts leaders from 26 regions worldwide in recognition of her work advancing inclusive arts and social impact. Our dancers were in Singapore for nine days at UWCSEA, running workshops, performing and joining the SLEN conference, while sparking a new creative partnership with ART:DIS. In Kampot, 80 children and caregivers came together for PSEA awareness sessions, building the knowledge communities need to keep children safe. And at Epic Arts Café, we reached the final phase of WEPsCAL, UN Women’s Corporate Action Lab, moving closer to more accessible leadership pathways for women with disabilities on our team.
To all our incredible supporters, thank you. Your continued belief in our mission helps us champion a world where every person counts (EPiC).
Inspiring Stories
Twenty Years, One Kitchen: Dolla's Story
Dolla grew up the only deaf person in her community, attending mainstream school for just two years with no access to formal sign language. In 2006 she found out about a two year Inclusive Arts Course at Epic Arts through a radio announcement. She applied, completed it and in then joined the Epic Arts Café team.
Dolla has been with the Café since it first opened, and this September marks twenty years there.
She began front of house, nervous about serving customers she wasn't sure could understand her. Two decades on she leads the kitchen, managing orders and overseeing the team with a calm, steady presence.
That steadiness now shapes how others learn the job. Staff look to Dolla for the kitchen schedule and newer team members are mentored directly by her, learning the trade the way she once did.
Upstairs in the Café, a mural pays tribute to her years of dedication, a quiet nod to how far she has come.
Outside work Dolla is raising a daughter and a son, determined to give them the education opportunities she did not have growing up.
Twenty years after that radio announcement, Dolla is no longer learning the ropes. She is the one teaching them.
Events and Performances
When Inclusive Tourism Takes Centre Stage
September brought two opportunities to put disability-inclusive tourism at the heart of the global travel conversation.
First, Epic Arts joined the GX networking evening in Phnom Penh as one of three community partners, bringing products from our Creations Shop handmade by our students and artists with disabilities. It was a chance to speak directly with travel industry leaders about what vocational training and fair income looks like for people with disabilities in Cambodia, and why that matters for responsible tourism.
A few days later, the conversation moved to Siem Reap for the GX World Community Tourism Summit, hosted by G Adventures and Planeterra Foundation and attended by 700 national and international guests. Presided over by Cambodia’s Minister of Tourism and opened by G Adventures Co-Founder Bruce Poon Tip, the summit brought together delegates from every continent to explore sustainable, community-centred tourism. With a gala dinner held under the floodlit towers of Bayon Temple, it was a powerful setting for the conversation Cambodia deserves to be part of.
For Epic Arts, showing up in both spaces matters. Every meal at Epic Arts Café, every Epic Arts Dance performance, every purchase in our Creations Shop is community tourism in action. When the world’s travel leaders discuss what responsible tourism looks like, we want disability-inclusive employment and the work of our artists to be part of that conversation.
Thank you to G Adventures and Planeterra Foundation for bringing us into this important conversation.
Inclusive Arts
Nine Days in Singapore: Epic Arts Dance on Tour
This month Epic Arts Dance embarked on a nine day tour to Singapore, one of our biggest outreach trips of the year, bringing inclusive dance to schools, stages and communities across the city.
At the heart of the tour was our longstanding partnership with UWCSEA. Our team ran workshops with Grade 2, middle school and high school students, delivered a whole school assembly performance and closed with the Service Learning Empowerment Network conference, where our CEO Sokny spoke about Epic Arts' story and our long standing partnership with UWCSEA, and our team led workshops for service learning coordinators from across the region. On stage, Singapore audiences experienced Buffalo Boy and The Ripple Effect.
The Grade 2 workshops ended with a learning share where parents and children danced together to celebrate what they had learned. It was exactly what inclusive arts looks like in practice.
"I love sharing Cambodian sign language with the students. I love when they can remember it and they come up to me showing all their signs." - Sann, Epic Arts Dance dancer.
"I loved sharing Cambodian culture and the traditional Krama scarf in the workshops, as well as my skills as a person with a disability." - Thoeun, Epic Arts Dance dancer.
Beyond UWCSEA, the team took part in an artist exchange with ART:DIS, sparking a new collaborative project set for 2027.
Every person counts. Thank you to everyone in Singapore who welcomed us so warmly.
Impact Update
Learning Together: Epic Arts at the Felm Asia Disability Rights Network 2026
This month our CEO Sokny and Operations Manager Buntheng travelled to Kathmandu, Nepal, for the Felm Asia Disability Rights Network 2026 gathering, hosted by CMC Nepal and bringing together Felm disability rights partners from across the region including Nepal, Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand.
Last year Epic Arts hosted this same gathering in Kampot. This year we were the guests, joining partners whose work spans different contexts, different disabilities and different barriers to inclusion.
For Sokny, the experience went beyond professional learning:
“As a woman with a disability, a wife, a mother, and someone working to advocate for disability inclusion in Cambodia, attending the Felm Asian Disability Rights Network 2026 in Nepal was both personal and deeply meaningful for me. It gave me space to listen, reflect and learn more deeply about the realities faced by people with psychosocial disabilities. It also challenged me to think beyond my own lived experience. Disability is not one single experience. The barriers people face can be very different depending on their disability, needs, identity and context.”
She added: “True inclusion cannot be based only on what we already know or what we have personally experienced. It requires us to keep listening, learning and making space for voices and experiences that may be different from our own.”
We bring that learning back to Kampot. Thank you to Felm Cambodia for making our participation possible.
Photo credit: CMC Nepal