Caylee So

Caylee was born in a refugee camp in Thailand on September 17th 1981, just after her parent’s escape from the reign of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. When she was three years old, her family immigrated to the United States. She grew up in Northern Virginia, where she spent most of her youth.

In 2000, soon after her high school graduation, Caylee joined the U.S. armed forces and served in the Virginia Army National Guard for the next eight years. In between tours of duty, Caylee attended Northern Virginia Community College, where she discovered her love for writing fiction. She later transferred to George Mason University to pursue a degree in creative writing. Creative writing led to theatre, and theatre led to film; all these mediums that had one thing in common: they captured stories.

In 2011, Caylee was awarded the Zonta’s Women in Film grant for Most Promising Young Filmmaker. In 2012 Caylee received her MFA in Film Production at Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, having won the Best Picture and Best Director at her school’s Cecil Awards. She is also the winner of the Director’s Guild of America’s 18th annual Best Female Student Director award. She is the co founder of the Cambodia Town Film Festival, an honorary committee member of the Cambodian International Film Festival, and the co founder of Innovision Pictures, a recipient of the Linda Mabelot’s New Directors/New Visions Award and the 32nd annual Los Angeles County “Women of the Year” Award. Her new feature film “In film “In The Life of Music” was released in 2018.