Welcome to intimacy coordinator Charlotte Nguyen’s sensual world

When Charlotte Nguyen pops into the Zoom room, the text card at the lower left corner of her window reads, “Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet.” 

“Oh, umm sorry, I’m going to log off and re-enter through my personal account. Is that okay?” she says. “I used to work with a monastery. I just don’t want a monk to…”

Nguyen is an intimacy coordinator based in Los Angeles who has led a multitudinous life. From August 2023 to May 2024, she was the global outreach and inclusion specialist at Plum Village, helping run the global monastery’s “Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet” online community; and for more than a decade, she has worked in nonprofits like Amnesty International USA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA), the D.C. Rape Crisis Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 2017, she founded her own creative mindfulness business Get Free!, and has led traditional tea ceremonies for corporate groups, hosted somatic practice workshops for BIPOC nonprofits, taught complimentary therapy courses such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) at universities, and spoken and performed at a myriad of arts and community events. These days, she spends most of her time attending production meetings, drafting nudity riders, researching intimate scenes from other films for creative references and inspiration, and choreographing movements in the dance studio before getting on set.

“Sometimes I'm like—I end up never really knowing how life is going to turn out!” Nguyen says.

It’s the day before Valentine’s Day, her favorite holiday, when we speak—almost three years after we first met as volunteers at a grassroots housing justice group in Los Angeles’ Chinatown and exactly a year after Nguyen first learned about intimacy coordination as a profession from the Internet. Her first solo project as an intimacy coordinator—the music video for “It Ain’t Safe” from rapper Tyga’s latest album, NSFW—dropped in early February. And she just wrapped work on the set of the short film Tiffany Blues with director and Emmy-nominated actress Rain Valdez.

“My job literally hinges on me believing in love and intimacy and having my erotic senses really alive, and my belief in humans and their capacity to communicate and be in their bodies. And I couldn't be more grateful to be doing this at this time,” Nguyen says. “It's honestly saving my life.”

Nguyen grew up in the heart of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, but being in the industry was never an evident career path—not to mention helping create sex scenes. Raised in a conventional Buddhist and Catholic family by Vietnamese refugee parents, Nguyen remembers cinema as her first encounter with sex and sexuality. “We definitely did not get any sex education, let alone, you know, knowledge about pleasure or anything like that,” she says.

Intimacy coordination, a relatively new profession emerging from the #MeToo movement, concerns the range of activities that support the creative vision of scenes involving nudity, simulated sex, and other intimate and hyper-exposed scenes while ensuring consent and safety. In 2020, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) published the industry’s first Standards and Protocols for the Use of Intimacy Coordinators. The first organization that trains intimacy practices in performance, Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE), was established in 2017. Since then, a spate of organizations have sprouted to provide training and, occasionally, certification programs for intimacy professionals and actors alike. According to Olivia Ku, a full-time and the first Asian American intimacy coordinator based in Hollywood, the number of people training in intimacy coordination has visibly grown, although most tend to be part-time, like Nguyen, or underemployed. Most recently, in November 2024, intimacy coordinators voted to unionize with SAG-AFTRA.

When Nguyen first looked up what “intimacy coordinator” means in February 2024, after reading an article about the TV series Bridgerton, something clicked. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, that. That's it. That's my calling,’” she says.

What led Nguyen to the article was her research about the retaliation performers would experience after calling out predatory behaviors in the workplace. In 2019, Nguyen began pole dancing as a way to supplement her income and pay off student debt, which over time turned into a passion that awakened her desire to express her sensual self. Her double life back then—as a movement facilitator and healer by day, and an exotic dancer and sex worker by night—was tasteful until it was not. “After a while that sort of wore out. I got tired of not knowing who I was going to be that day,” Nguyen says. She longed for some unity, a way to bring together her two selves: the socially engaged, justice-minded side, and the sexually desirous side.

In the strip clubs, meanwhile, women talked. “It would just be a totally commonplace thing for them to tell me, ‘Yeah, some dude on set just grabbed me inappropriately,’” Nguyen says. “Also, growing up in Los Angeles, I'm surrounded by people who work in the industry, and it's just so commonplace to hear these stories of disrespect, particularly for women of color.” As a survivor of sexual assault by a ballet instructor during her sophomore year of college, Nguyen also understands these stories and the precarity of young creatives intimately.

“It really felt like the universe pan-tailored this job for me so I can bring all of my life experience into this role,” she says.

A license is not yet available for practicing intimacy coordination, but SAG-AFTRA does have a list of requirements one needs to meet to be considered qualified, including training in consent, anti-sexual harassment, conflict resolution, bystander intervention, movement coaching, and mental health first aid. Nguyen had already met many of these requirements thanks to her past experiences. The only things she still needed were some workshops on choreography and modesty garments and barriers use—or so she was told by early mentors like Ku, who remembered first meeting Nguyen at a tea ceremony Nguyen facilitated in 2019. The two crossed paths again last spring at a Hollywood rooftop party for intimacy coordinators. They grabbed tea later, as Nguyen sought insights and advice from Ku on entering the profession, and Ku was generous and encouraging.

From there, Nguyen shadowed and assisted on a few productions, from short genre films to commercials. She landed her first solo project with Tyga’s team in July 2024 through the referral of a friend of a friend who was producing the shoot. As an independent intimacy coordinator, Nguyen says the way each project comes about often differs—sometimes through an open call on a social media post, and sometimes just word of mouth. What matters is matching the aesthetics of the intimacy coordinator and the project.

“All ICs (intimacy coordinators) are different. I don’t think every IC would have looked at that treatment and be like, ‘This is awesome.’ They might be like, ‘Oh, this isn't tasteful, or exploitative,’” Nguyen says. “There are ICs that work on period pieces like Bridgerton and there are ICs that work on, you know, Tyga’s content."

“I think as Asian American women, we belong in other people’s erotic imaginations, but people don’t ever stop to think that we have an erotic imagination of our own."

As people approach the role differently, Nguyen enjoys times when she gets to contribute creatively, such as presenting an idea for choreography, which she says sometimes surprises the director. “I think as Asian American women, we belong in other people’s erotic imaginations, but people don’t ever stop to think that we have an erotic imagination of our own,” Nguyen says.

For the Tyga project, Nguyen worked with six actresses and models on set for 12 hours. As part of her practice, Nguyen brought the actors and the creative team roses at the end of the shoot.

“My hope is that it sets a standard for them of how they ought to be treated on a set,” Nguyen says. “I'm grateful to just be a small part of that cultural shift.”