For her senior thesis, Sophie is composing a full-length, narrative-style film treatment highlighting the escape from Vietnam in 1987 of Kim Pham, a remarkable women who orchestrated the clandestine liberation of nearly five hundred of her fellow political and economic asylum seekers and who ultimately rose to become a leader of Boston’s Chinatown community, culminating with the establishment of Kim’s Fashion Design in the luxury Copley Place mall.
Sophie has been conducting research for her thesis since the summer of 2021. In 2022, she established Daughter Dragon Productions and secured a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship with the non-profit Cambridge Community Center for the Arts. This spring, 2023, Sophie independently journeyed to Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines, where she conducted primary source interviews and visited two of the refugee camps where Kim Pham once found sanctuary.
An AMEC major, Sophie is writing her thesis under the supervision of Columbia University’s EALAC department.