Biography

Bopha Phorn is a freelance reporter based in Phnom Penh. Her byline has appeared in outlets including Al Jazeera, the Associated Press, Nikkei Asia, ICIJ, Voice of America, and ABC America. She is also a part-time lecturer at Pannhasastra University, teaching the course “Introduction to Journalism, Ethics and Media Law, and Social Problems.”

Over the past decade, Bopha Phorn has covered a wide range of topics such as social injustice, press freedom, health, the environment, climate change, technology and science. Previously she was a reporter covering social injustice, corruption, environment, court and health issues for the Cambodia Daily. Later she was promoted to be an editor. Bopha won the International Women’s Media Foundation’s 2013 Courage in Journalism Award.

Bopha worked as a digital journalist at the American Broadcasting Company based in New York from 2018 to 2019 after she finished a six-week internship with the Associated Press where she wrote a feature story about Cambodians in exile.

Bopha Phorn was awarded Fulbright’s Hubert.H. Humphrey Fellowship to study journalism at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in Arizona from 2017 to 2018. She has been acknowledged for contributions to well-known books about Cambodia including Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land by Joel Brinkley and Hun Sen’s Cambodia by Sabasitan Strangio. She has also contributed a piece of short fiction for a noir anthology called Phnom Penh Noir and an essay to a book called When We are Bold: Women who Turn Our Upsidedown World, which portrayed outstanding women around the world.