Touring Australia for the first time, Amanda Nguyen takes the stage for an unfiltered conversation about sexual violence and the systems that perpetuate it, as well as race, identity and diaspora. She also explores what it means to reclaim your life and your dreams in the aftermath of the unthinkable.
In 2013, three months before graduation, Amanda Nguyen was raped at Harvard.
The daughter of Vietnamese war refugees, Nguyen had spent her life defying the odds, studying astrophysics, interning at NASA, dreaming of the stars.
To protect her career, she filed her rape kit anonymously, to discover the state would destroy the evidence if not renewed, a bitter biannual marker, simply to preserve her chance at justice.
She had two choices: accept a system designed to silence survivors, or rewrite the law. She rewrote the law.
Nguyen founded Rise, drove the rare and unanimous passage of a bill for the benefit of survivors of sexual assaults, ignited the Stop Asian Hate movement, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, named TIME Woman of the Year, and, in April 2025, realised her dreams by flying to space — the first Southeastern Asian woman to ever do so.
This is not a keynote. It is a reckoning, a testament, and a call to action from one of the most extraordinary voices of her generation.
