Shanee Stepakoff
Independent Filmmaker
Organization: Director, Producer documentary film Threads: Kosal's Reel
Biography
I hold a BA in English, summa cum laude, from the University of Maine, an MFA in creative writing from The New School, and am nearing completion of a PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island. I am the author of Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Bucknell University Press, 2021) and of over two dozen scholarly essays, articles, and chapters on literary and artistic responses to collective trauma. I have won awards for my writing in the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I also spent two years as a psychologist/trainer with CVT (Center for Victims of Torture), first in Guinea and later in Jordan. From 2005 to 2007 I was the psychologist for witnesses at the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone. Additionally, I provided training for Cambodian NGOs responsible for the provision of psychosocial support for witnesses in the Khmer Rouge tribunal. My vision for Threads: Kosal’s Reel began crystallizing in early 1986, shortly after I graduated from college in Worcester, Massachusetts and moved to San Francisco, where I volunteered as an English-as-a-second language teacher for Cambodian refugee women and first encountered the film’s subject, Kosal Nhean.
Films
Threads: Kosal's Reel (2026)
Role: Independent Filmmaker
The moving life story of Kosal, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide, is interwoven with that of her volunteer English teacher (Shanee), a Jewish American woman who first met Kosal when Kosal was a newly arrived refugee in San Francisco. Using vivid footage shot in Cambodia and California over the course of two decades, and supported by a riveting historical backdrop of archival material, the relationship of these two women starts as teacher and pupil, both in their early 20s, and grows into a remarkable lifelong friendship. Resonances between Kosal’s experience and that of Shanee’s grandmother, who fled pogroms in Ukraine during the early 1920s to find refuge in the United States, make it clear that across enormous differences of culture and context, it is always possible to find ways to connect and be moved by each other’s stories.
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