Attorney, playwright and professor Sophia Murashkovsky Romma
Courtesy photo
It’s rare for lawyers to begin their career trajectory in experimental theater, but to listen to Sophia Murashkovsky Romma describe her practice, it’s a direct extension of her art and advocacy.
Romma is a human-rights lawyer, filmmaker, playwright, and educator whose legal work and art are dedicated to telling the story of persecution, exile, and displacement of immigrants from Eastern Europe. She describes law and art as two interconnected sides of her greater mission as an advocate. Both seek to preserve human dignity and confront injustice.
“I really see those two sides of my life as one pursuit because whether I’m practicing or telling a story or reading a story, I’m trying to illuminate the human experience, and give voice to people who may not otherwise be heard and confront injustice,” Romma said. “I do it in film, I do it in theater, and I do it in law. The instruments are different, per se, but the purpose is the same.”
Romma’s path was irrevocably shaped by her family’s immigration to New York from the Soviet Union when she was six years old. She found her voice working within the realm of oral history to tell stories about immigration, assimilation, and identity as she established herself as a playwright and writer in the orbit of the Lower East Side’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Her early artistic work relied heavily on sourcing stories of real people — a practice she associates with mentors including Anna Deavere Smith and Leslie Lee.
But in working closely with the stories of people struggling with the psychological scars and real threats of oppressive government regimes, Romma began to explore how she could improve those lives when they were stuck in limbo, and needed legal help.
“In filmmaking and playwriting, I’ve dealt with war, displacement, trauma, and gender identity and injustice… Those stories made me increasingly interested in what happens when the people behind them actually need protection and what the law can do for them because law gave me another language for advocacy,” Romma said.
Playwright makes human rights her focus in law
By the time she went to law school, she was in her early 40s with an impressive resume as a playwright. Though she was the oldest student at Fordham Law, Romma felt right at home studying human rights and international law as a natural next step of her calling.
Her legal practice as a human rights and international justice advocate specializes in refugee protection, migration law, and the rights of women and children affected by conflict. Her clients are primarily international, often located across Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and other regions. Romma said her work involves both representing individuals as well as broader advocacy through the New York City Bar Association, international institutions, policy work and research.
When she works with individual clients, Romma said her advocacy is “personal and fact-specific” and sometimes involves connecting them with counsel in their native country or countries where they have taken refuge. For instance, Romma worked with a group of Ukrainian women and children living in Tallinn, Estonia during the production of her recent documentary “Soul Arbitration”. She built trust with the women slowly by living with them, eating and talking with them about their lives.
Romma does not advertise her services broadly but relies largely on word of mouth and her human rights and academic networks for referrals. She said she works closely with other human rights advocates and counselors, but her work is distinct from social workers or psychologists. In her conversations with refugees, she works to create “a clear cohesive record of the facts” as it pertains to their case whether it’s related to asylum or gender-based violence.
Attorney-client privilege allows Romma to assure her clients that they are safe to tell their whole story, even the parts that are “difficult or unfavorable.” In soliciting these stories, Romma said that she has come to see “law not merely as a profession, but as a sacred instrument through which we can grant a voice to people whose plight might otherwise remain unheard.”
“For me, the law is at its most meaningful when it restores agency to people who might otherwise have none within the systems affecting their lives..” Romma said. “It’s not that it’s a celestial microphone hanging from the sky, but it is that sacred instrument that allows you as an advocate or as a human rights attorney to provide that microphone to people so that they can speak out and not be afraid because they have someone to stand over them and with them.”
On the bar’s United Nations Committee
Romma has turned these experiences into policy work, publishing draft statements on migratory rights and refugee safeguards for the NYC Bar and UN‑related advocacy initiatives. She serves as Chair of the United Nations Committee of the New York City Bar Association, where she oversees the bar’s output on international legal accountability.
But before she was either an artist or a lawyer, Romma herself was an emigrée. She came to the United States with her mother in 1979 at age six, fleeing discrimination against their Roma and Jewish ancestry. They settled on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with support from refugee-resettlement programs.
Her family followed the path of her grandparents, who had both sought asylum in the U.S. due to repression under the Soviet Union. She said her grandfather spent 10 years in a gulag, and two in a prison for “enemies of the state” along with her grandmother. Her grandparents eventually emigrated under President John F. Kennedy.
Building a new life in a new country is full of trials. Romma’s mother, a microbiologist by training, struggled with the language barrier and couldn’t find work in her field, and took on jobs like giving massages and cleaning other people’s homes.
“Having gone through the asylum process with my own family gave me an early comprehension that behind every legal trial is a family living with uncertainty,” Romma said. “You’re navigating unfamiliar institutions while carrying this fear, this loss, and this enormous responsibility of rebuilding a life that isn’t your own, and that gives it, that gives you even more immediacy and more responsibility for another person’s life.”
In the countries where Romma works, the phrase “rule of law” doesn’t carry the same significance as it does in the U.S., she said, so her work oftentimes involves exploring that concept with her clients and connecting the individual case to the appropriate domestic or international protections.
She said, above all, she believes advocacy to go beyond a client’s legal interests, to protect their voice, dignity, privacy, and in some cases their safety. For Romma, the lawyer seeks justice while the artist seeks understanding. She believes artistic training has helped her interpret people’s motives and vulnerabilities. On the other hand, legal work has deepened her understanding of institutional failure as an artist.
“I think it may be an unusual combination, but for me it feels completely natural,” she said.