Charya Burt is an acclaimed master dancer, choreographer, vocalist and teacher of Classical Cambodian Dance. After the Khmer Rouge genocide, Burt trained extensively with Cambodia’s foremost surviving dance masters and toured internationally as a member of Cambodia’s Royal Dance Troupe. Before emigrating to the United States in 1993 she was a dance instructor at Cambodia’s Royal University of Fine Arts. Burt has devoted her life to reviving classical Cambodian dance through preserving authentic movements,  gestures and dances of the classical repertory, thus helping to strengthen a sense of cultural identity for Cambodian-Americans. She has trained thousands of dance students throughout California including multiple stints as artist-in-residence at Cambodian cultural centers in Stockton, San Jose, and Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach.

An inaugural Dance/USA and 2022 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellow and Isadora Duncan Award recipient for Individual Performance, Burt has received multiple grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Creative Work Fund, and Alliance for California Traditional Arts including their Living Cultures Grant (2021) to create the Charya Burt Cambodian Dance Digital Library. A Hewlett 50 Arts Commission was awarded her in 2021 to create The Rebirth of Apsara: Artistic Lineage, Cultural Resilience and the Resurrection of Cambodian Arts from the Ashes of Genocide that premiered at Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center in 2024. In 2025 she premiered an adaptation of that work, The Rebirth of Apsara: Beyond Genocide, at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center to observe the 50th Anniversary of the Cambodian Genocide that then toured across the U.S. and in Cambodia. A true culture bearer, Burt has conducted workshops at schools and colleges around the country.

Burt has performed her original works throughout the nation at venues including Jacob’s Pillow, San Francisco Opera House, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and many others.  Her recent choreographic works include Beautiful Dark (2024) about the relationship between colorism and perceptions of beauty, Silenced (2018), Of Spirits Intertwined (2018), and Heavenly Garden (2016). Burt’s mission is to continue to preserve and renew her art-form, elevate the professionalism of community dance groups, and to create innovative new works firmly rooted in tradition. She is founding artistic director of Charya Burt Cambodian Dance, based in the San Francisco North Bay.