Alumni: We are everywhere!

Aafia Alladin (Project Design Lab 2024) I am currently a first year student pursuing my master's in Social Work (MSW) at the Columbia School of Social Work. Specifically, I'm completing the advanced clinical track as a two year full time residential student. Correspondingly, I work for the CSSW Action Lab, where I am involved in various initiatives that aim to promote social justice through research and community based projects. For my social work practicum, I am interning at a school in the Bronx, where I provide counseling to elementary students on social and emotional learning (SEL) related topics and facilitate student groups. I have engaged in several research projects that revolve around the theme of disability activism and education. I graduated from Hofstra University in May 2023 where I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a minor in Disability Studies. I identify as a South Asian neurodivergent Muslim woman who aims to advocate for myself and guide neurodivergent youth to navigate their mental health challenges by exploring research-based interventions or resources. I enjoy writing poetry and writing stories that reflect on my lived experiences and give me space to express myself.

Adam Lubinsky (Oral History for Organizations 2021) is Managing Principal at WXY Studio. Adam leads a range of planning studies, strategic visions and master plans, and he has created new practice areas that address mobility, education and economic development using data analysis, design and new forms of community engagement. Adam holds a Masters in Architecture from Columbia University and a PhD in planning from the University College London. Adam is a Fellow of the Urban Design Forum and is a frequent speaker on urban issues. Adam has been a visiting faculty member at Cornell University, Columbia University, the New School and the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Adriana Widdoes (OHSS Intensive 2016): I am an LA-based writer exploring nonfiction narrative at various stages of blurring through text, video, audio, and photographic works. In 2014 I earned my MFA in Writing and Integrated Media from California Institute of Arts, where I concentrated in Documentary Strategies.. After receiving my MFA, I co-founded Which Witch L.A., a fem-focused publishing project interested in community building around printed matter, collaborative works, and curated events. Which Witch seeks to explore the complex (and at times contradictory) intersectional definitions of female, feminine, and feminist as a sustained investigation throughout our publishing practice and recently presented “How Are You Feeling Today?” — a non-monetary and communal self-care exchange in collaboration with the Women’s Center for Creative Work at the 2016 L.A. Art Book Fair. Some of my other areas of interest include: alternative archives, informal economies/modes of exchange, ritual, failed communes, cults, illness and recovery narratives, institutionalization, generational trauma, testimony, and foster care.

Adrian Wood (OHSS “Talking White” 2022, Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) (they/them) is a sound artist, multimedia producer and social practitioner working at the intersection of landscape and identity towards the goal of environmental justice and a regenerative economy. Adrian’s social practice is multifaceted: they serve as a board of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology; they co-organized a Virginia Queer Farmer Convergence in 2022; and, in 2017, they co-founded a DIY environmental justice podcast documenting resistance to now-cancelled Atlantic Coast Pipeline. In their role as Multimedia Producer with the University of Virginia's Repair Lab, Adrian wrote and produced the podcast Wading Between Two Titans, which earned two 2023 Signal Awards in the categories of Sustainability & Environment and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.

Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) is a freelance editor and producer currently based in Lisbon. A first generation Ghanaian-American, she chases immigrant narratives wherever she can find them: unruly stories of people where they're not "supposed" to be. Adwoa is proficient in everything from news and documentary to non-narrated work (and a bit of audio fiction). She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, and a BA in Media Studies from New College of Florida.

Aiden Bettine (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is an archivist and historian who researches and teaches local history pertaining to race, gender, and sexuality in the Midwest. He specializes in oral history, public history, and community engagement with archives. His community work prioritizes creating generative spaces for LGBTQ people to learn, share, and research our history. Prior to joining Archives and Special Collections as the Curator of the Tretter Collection in August of 2022, Aiden founded the LGBTQ Iowa Archives & Library, a community archives and lending library in Iowa City, IA. Aiden is a PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies: Public History and Archival Science at the University of Iowa. His dissertation research examines the history of queer community archives founded in the 1970s and 1980s across the United States and the networks that lesbian and gay community archivists and librarians built to facilitate the preservation of LGBTQ history. Outside of archival work, Aiden co-runs Late Night Copies Press, a micro press based in Minneapolis, MN that specializes in publishing queer and trans zines about local history, archives, and informal research.

Akin Ajayi (October Mini Intensive 2021) I'm a freelance writer and editor. After training as a lawyer in the early 1990s, I worked in child welfare and education social work in the UK for about a decade. Presently I write for and co-edit The Tel Aviv Review of Books (www.tarb.co.il) – an online journal exploring the politics and culture of Israel, along with its links to the wider world.

Alana Rose (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) (she/her) is a former anthropology major from the University of Pennsylvania and activist now working in healthcare and impatient for its transformation. She has been eliciting and collecting stories from community members for nearly 20 years and is excited by the power of sharing them through the format of oral histories.

Alanna Navitsk (April Mini-Intensive 2021) has been exploring and creating with young children and families since 1999. Her experiences as a classroom teacher, home-based special educator, adult educator, and program director have led her to a deep appreciation of the joy of discovery through child-led work, and of the power of supportive, inclusive communities for both children and adults. These principles guide her work. She holds a Master's Degree in Early Childhood General and Special Education, as well as a Master's Degree in Leadership for Educational Change, both from Bank Street College of Education.

Alanna Medlock (OHWS Radio 2015): I’ve worked as an actor, singer and collaborator for over 20 years on ensemble-generated, script-based and “devised” theater projects, and am interested in telling stories about the lives of artists and creative process. I’ve also done some voiceover work for theater, ad spots and radio plays. I’m pretty new to radio production, but I got my feet wet with Radio Boot Camp at Union Docs, and found that I was excited by the editing process in particular. I’m usually making a living doing some combination of copy editing, writing, bookkeeping and web communications for small businesses, and I have a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Acting from Columbia University. As I learn more about oral history and storytelling, I’d like to explore playful ways of combining documentation and art-making. In my free time I enjoy hiking, exploring offbeat art spaces and finding opportunities to sing harmonies, preferably around a fire with bourbon. I currently divide my time between Saugerties, NY and NYC.

Alec Pollak (OHSS Intensive 2021) I am a writer and English PhD student at Cornell University. I am currently at work on a biography of feminist writer Joanna Russ, for which I won the Ursula Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship in 2018. Before coming to graduate school, I worked as an affordable housing grant writer and community organizer.

Alex Chouinard (OHSS Intensive 2019) I have a B.A. in English & Canadian Studies, a diploma in Assaulted Women's Advocacy and Counselling, and have been lucky to learn from great professors, elders, coworkers, captains and community members. I've worked as a researcher, arts facilitator, barista, and frontline social worker in mostly Toronto. Emotional about radio, place-based narratives and country music.

Alexandra Kendall (OHSS Intensive 2012) works in the field of international development and human rights. Most recently, she has worked as a policy analyst for Congress, providing analysis on issues related to international development, global health, gender-based violence, and post-conflict and post-disaster reconstruction efforts. She has also worked on programs related to women’s health, HIV/AIDS, sexual violence, human trafficking, and youth education in Haiti, Senegal, Rwanda, South Africa, and Cambodia. She has a Masters in International Relations from Yale University. She is interested in approaching international development from a human rights-based perspective, and hopes to explore oral history as a tool for supporting the meaningful inclusion of local voices in the international development process.

Alice Goldfarb (OHSS Intensive 2019) Alice Goldfarb is a master's student in the Media Studies department at the New School. She is about to begin her final year, and will be focused on writing a thesis about the postal service in the United States, especially in rural areas. Part of her excitement about studying the post office is being able to tell stories about women working. Previously, she did map making, data analysis and visualization work at NPR, after having been a flight instructor, taught at a progressive high school, and studied physics and mathematics. During this upcoming time of academic concentration, undistracted by working in another city, Goldfarb hopes to also spend time on making maps and mail art.

Alice Kim (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a writer, activist, educator and cultural organizer. She is a co-founder of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials and the Editor of Praxis Center, an online resource center hosted by the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College. Alice also teaches at Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security prison for men, through the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project and has taught Gender and Women's Studies courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is currently curating an exhibit, Freedom Dreams in the Age of Mass Incarceration, at UIC Social Justice Initiative's Pop Up Just Art Gallery inspired by the students who took part in her class at Stateville last fall. She was previously the director of The Public Square at the Illinois Humanities Council and a national organizer with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

Alicia Aroche (OHSS Intensive 2018) is a writer and community-based participatory researcher, interested in using the power of storytelling and narrative to give voice to social justice issues, among marginalized communities, and facilitate community-driven solutions. Her writing and communications career led her to film production, where she performed story analysis and development for a studio run by Emmy-Award Winning actor Tim Reid; as well as feature writing published by the Hurston Wright Foundation, Style Weekly, the Richmond Free Press, and various blogs. Her interview subjects have included the 2008 recipient of the U. S. State Department of State International Woman of Courage of Award, for her work on Violence Against Women with impunity in Central America. Recently, her short film on human trafficking, “Empty Chair,” was selected for screening at the New York Short Film festival, as well as selected for the 2018 Oral History Association Conference, being held in Montreal this fall. Alicia also consulted on a community-based participatory oral history project “Unsung Heroes: Together we Rise” that chronicles the experiences of several African-Americans who were the first to attend integrated schools in their community in the Northside of Richmond Virginia. Within her work with community-based participatory research work, she has served as a co-investigator on projects examining social determinants of health, such as education, built environment, mental health and community cohesion within low-wealth, high poverty communities of color. She currently works at the School of Medicine, at Virginia Commonwealth University, in the Center on Society and Health. Alicia has an undergraduate degree in mass communications and a master’s degree in education, with a focus on action learning and research. She is based in Richmond, Virginia.

Alicia Lochard (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a doctoral student in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, with research interests in Black women's history, feminisms, and poetry. She is developing an oral history project that explores motherhood, and women's experiences of kinship and intimacy across the African diaspora.

Aliza Becker (OHSS Intensive 2014, Project Lab 2014, Oral History & Writing 2019) Aliza Becker has founded two oral history collections: The American Jewish Peace Archive, which documents 50 years of Middle East peace activism and The Meanings of October 27th: Reflections by Pittsburghers on the 2018 Synagogue Shooting. Becker received her initial oral history training at the Oral History Summer School. She previously worked as an immigration advocate for 20 years and a Middle East peace advocate for 10 years.

Allie Fischgrund (OHSS Intensive 2019) I am a recent graduate of the University of Rochester with a degree in anthropology. My interest in oral history was piqued when I lived/studied in Cuba for a semester, speaking with people of different generations about their experiences in/with Cuba and more particularly, with the revolution and government. I returned to school and got involved with the Rochester Decarceration Research Initiative, traveling to the town of Attica to conduct interviews with people to find out about their experiences, both directly and indirectly related to the prison, and continued research and interviews in the city of Rochester thereafter. I am interested in preserving stories and memories of those who have struggled for autonomy and dignity, and am excited to gain experience in oral history, using this opportunity as a jumping-off point for my further professional/personal endeavors.

Allison Lichter (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) is a journalist and journalism educator. She teaches at The New School.

Allison Manuel (Project Design Lab 2024) a storyteller, community organizer, and oral historian in the Bronx, NY and Durham, NC. She has worked with national networks and with grassroots organizations and campaigns across the country to help them document their work, develop narrative strategy, and produce media to tell their story in ways that inspire change and build leadership. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School.

Allison Schein Holmes (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016, OHSS “Talking White” 2022) MLIS, CA is the Director of Media Archives for WTTW/WFMT and the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, who received archivist certification in 2013. She was the archivist for the Creative Audio Archive, processed collections at Johnson Publishing Company, and the Arts Club of Chicago, and worked for Northwestern University Library.

Allyson Strafella (OHSS Intensive 2015) has been making drawings with a typewriter for nearly 23 years. She has been an avid listener of stories, especially after working with adults with chronic schizophrenia. She has also worked at a farm in Columbia County, and appreciates the many ways that being an artist has put her in contact with a wide variety of people.

Alyssa Brown (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) is a Litigation Assistant on NRDC’s Litigation Team. Prior to that role, she focused on food access as an intern with Missouri Coalition for the Environment, worked as a community and identity building fellow at her college’s intercultural center, and was involved in several equity- and justice-based facilitation and community-building programs. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College in environmental policy and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. Alyssa is exploring next steps for a career and life dedicated to the climate justice movement and rooted in care.

A. Martinez (she/her) (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022, Project Design Lab 2024) is a poet, visual artist, mother, and organizer living in Chicago. Her work explores family, rituals, nature, and the body. Alyssa’s social practice involves participatory community gatherings including those for mothers in the arts. She also works as an arts administrator for music performance organizations.

Amanda Littauer (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016): I am an assistant professor of History and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Northern Illinois University. I earned my PhD from UC Berkeley, where I was introduced to oral history as an interviewer for the Rosie the Riveter Memorial Project in the city of Richmond. My teaching and research interests include gender, sexuality, race, youth, and social justice in US history, as well as feminist and queer theory. My first book, Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties, was published in 2015. I argue in the book that transgressive sexual attitudes and practices among teen girls and young women in the 1940s and '50s catalyzed the sexual revolution that we usually associate with the years after 1968. My current research focuses on queer youth histories between 1940 and 1980, including the experiences of youth in liberation movements. Oral history interviewing will be central to this project, which I hope ultimately to publish both as a scholarly book and also in formats targeted to young adult audiences.

Amira Karaoud (Song Collecting and Composing 2023) is a multimedia journalist and Visual Anthropologist based between Senegal and Kentucky. She is passionate about telling stories of tight-knit communities that thrive on finding authenticities and creating connections around their subculture. Throughout the years Karaoud worked with different clients including as Visual Journalist, writer and audio reporter for Reuters, PBS, Bloomberg, Nawaat, Hyphenonline, and many other clients in the US, UK, and Tunisia.... Her last audio work was reporting for Foreign Policy's podcast "The Negotiator". She also contributed to the show "the other Latif" with RadioLab, and collaborated with other NPR radio programs and podcasts in the US and Nigeria. Her personal podcast on Women Experience of Immigration in the North America was selected by Louisville Public Radio incubator for production.

Amy Anselmo (Radio 2014): I have been using a short form of oral history and interview for a project I work with called Threshold Collaborative. I have also taught a few workshops in storygathering and editing. I am very interested in combining story/sound with art and photography. Public art installations and other creative ways of getting stories out in public are very intriguing to me. I have conducted a lot of interviews with Threshold Collaborative. My first project, entitled “Conversations with Farm Women” focused on gathering stories with women farmers. That project led to a job gathering stories around food access/food justice with Wholesome Wave and most recently I was involved a great project with high school students called “a picture is worth…” I also helped design a storygathering toolkit for Threshold Collaborative, which is a sort of guide to oral history technique, equipment ethics and resources.

Amy Taylor (OHWS Family 2015): I am a licensed psychologist working with individuals, couples, and families in Western Massachusetts and a graduate of Duquesne University’s clinical psychology program and Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research in Pittsburgh. In my work as a psychotherapist, I am immersed in cultural, communal, familial, and individual developmental narratives. I study how context informs identity, and my research involves investigating how people develop narratives (and invoke technologies and use relationships) in ongoing efforts to (re) embody and adaptively live their bodies throughout life. I am interested in learning more about how one derives a sense of oneself from one’s family context, including the very earliest sense of oneself via bodily contact and holding/ handling from caretaking others, which I hope will help me develop my thinking about how bodily encounters and experiences continue to be a primary source of identity throughout life. I joined OHWS both to engage in learning which will deepen my work as a collaborator with other embodied subjects engaged in narrating their ways into their lives, and as an autoethnographic encounter, to continue my own project of self-narration and bringing my context into consciousness.

Amy Vicknair (December Mini Intensive 2021) is the creator of The Birth of a Mother, a storytelling project documenting one of the most complex transformations one can experience – matrescence – the transition into motherhood. Amy is a parent advocate dedicated to the importance of preserving and sharing these stories for our current community of new moms and for future generations. She imagines a world where the rite of passage into motherhood is understood through education, honored through storytelling, and meaningfully supported through policy. Amy is currently participating in the certificate program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. She is also studying perinatal mental health through Postpartum Support International. Amy holds a BS in physics from UCLA and her current profession is raising her four-year-old daughter.

Amy Wu (October Mini Intensive 2021) is an award-winning writer for the women’s ag and agtech movement. She is the Creator & Chief Content Director of From Farms to Incubators, a multimedia platform that uses documentary, video, photography and the written word to tell the stories of women leaders and innovators in agtech. It has a mission of highlighting women in food, farming, and farmtech, especially women of color. From Farms to Incubators includes an award-winning documentary short that has been screened at SXSW, and a best-selling book “From Farms to Incubators: Women Revolutionizing How Our Food Is Grown” that was released in May 2021. In 2020 Amy was named on Worth magazine’s “Groundbreakers 2020 list of 50 Women Changing the World” list. She was also a recipient of the Women in Agribusiness Demeter Award of Excellence. In 2021 she was named by Food Tank as one of “27 Inspiring Women Reshaping the Food System.” Prior to starting From Farms to Incubators, Amy spent over two decades as an investigative reporter at media outlets including the USA Today Network where she reported on agriculture and agtech for The Salinas Californian. She has a bachelor’s degree in history from New York University and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

Ana Malagon (Oral History & Writing 2019) I have worked as a physicist and software engineer, and have always treasured oral traditions and learning through stories. I am interested in formulating questions to probe my own family history (refugees from Hungary, immigrants from the Dominican Republic) and learning how to help people who have a hard time putting their histories into words.

Ana Maria Toro Orozco (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) is a graphic designer who has worked in print and digital design based in New York but quarantined in a serendipitous place: her hometown of Medellin, Colombia. Beyond her BFA in Graphic Design from The College of New Jersey, she studied Design Criticism in the School of Visual Arts, where she talked a lot about buildings, and has a Post-Graduate degree in Design Thinking and Innovation from the Elisava School of Design and Engineering, where she talked a lot about humans and what they want (she’s still trying to figure that one out). Here she became particularly interested in the creative process, completing exciting work with the ElBulli x Elisava Lab and dived into research about use of innovative technologies in new media art and storytelling. She's interested in the intersections of art, technology, and design criticism, wherever these may be. Currently, she’s in and out of her comfort zone, learning as much as she can, uncertain about her future but searching for unfamiliar spaces full of possibilities.

Ananya Garg (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) is the School and Teens Programs Fellow with the Brooklyn Museum's Museum Education Fellowship Program. She is currently working on an oral history project that explores the impacts of doing oral history interviews on interviewees. She studied Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies and Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington where she completed an oral history project about queer and trans students of color at the university.

Andrea Friedman (OHSS Intensive 2017): I am a professor of History and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. I am currently working on several collaborative projects to document the queer past in the St. Louis region, especially the relationship between sexuality and segregation. These include a historical GIS map and a service learning course in which my students will be working with the grassroots St. Louis LGBT History project to build an expanded archive. I'm new to oral history and very excited to stretch my own skills and bring its methods to these projects, that we hope will contribute to more diverse and inclusive histories.

Andrea Nelson (Building Your Own Transcription Style Guide 2024) is the Administrative and Communications Coordinator for the Rikers Public Memory Project. In her role with RPMP, Andrea supports the development of a community generated Mobile Exhibit about Rikers Island jail facilities in New York City. She also coordinates the efforts to continue growing RPMP's archive of Oral Histories, recorded with the help of dozens of volunteers and shared generously by people who have been personally detained or supported a loved one at Rikers. Learn more about RPMP at rikersmemoryproject.org.

Andreina Himy (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) an entrepreneur with a background in Literary Studies, documentary podcast production, journalism, and blockchain technology. She co-founded Buenos Aires podcast production project Mantel.world in 2022.

Andrew Leland (I Am Sitting In A Room 2017) is the host and producer of the Organist (kcrw.com/theorganist), an arts and culture podcast from KCRW and the Believer magazine. He recently received a commission to produce a series of audio essays about vision loss for the magazine Triple Canopy. He works as a lecturer in English at Smith College and teaches in the Journalism department at UMass-Amherst. His website is (or will be) andrewleland.org.

Andy Marquis (OHSS Intensive 2018, Oral History and Writing 2019): Originally, I trained to be an astronomer. I studied star formation in the early universe. Almost on a lark, I decided to tutor some kids in math at a library. That experience blew my mind, so I became a public school teacher. I have considered myself a teacher ever since. Increasingly, though, I split my time between several different projects: a curriculum reform initiative, an inmate education initiative, a philosophy summer camp, coaching kids, pushing back against the woe of rampant intellectualism in academic philosophy---and also putting equipment in boxes and shipping those boxes across the country for a cool eighteen bucks an hour. My spirit animals are Nietzsche, Arendt, and Heidegger, even though he was a Nazi. In the future, I want to explore possible connections between oral history methodology and what William Connolly calls ‘relational self-artistry’. I think liberal modernity might be a Faustian bargain, and I hope to spend the rest of my career meaning-making with students in public schools.

Angela DiBattiste (Archive 2013) Unfortunately since graduating college I have been less involved in Oral History endeavors. While I was fortunate enough to find a full-time position as a Assistant Pre-K Teacher, I hadn’t, and still don’t really imagine continuing my education in traditional (primary) education. It is important to note, however, that my life hasn’t been completely void of Oral History. Over the past couple months I have been able to transcribe a few interviews as a volunteer for a recent exhibition at the Philadelphia Folklore Project, titled “Honoring Ancestors of Rhythm, Movement and Place,” as well as run a semi-successful weekly workshop about Oral History for displaced youth in Philadelphia at the Youth Health Empowerment Project. More recently I have tried to get involved with pubic radio at WHYY and explore radio as a channel for Oral History.

Angelica Clarke (C&C 2015) recently became the Executive Director of the Albany Social Justice Center, which is an activist resource center, info-shop and office with a variety of member organizations. Her organizing focus is on ending state violence through community empowerment, specifically police brutality, prisons and poverty.

Anita Hecht (Radio 2014): I’ve been a life long student, mostly in the humanities and languages, earning degrees in History (1987, UW-Madison) and Clinical Social Work (1993). Among other things, I’ve worked an as ESL teacher abroad, a licensed psychotherapist in Wisconsin, and a yoga teacher long before the days it was hip. I cut my oral history teeth in 1995, interviewing Holocaust survivors on videotape (old fashioned Betacam SP) with Steven Spielberg’s Visual History Foundation of the Shoah. This experience led me back to Mexico City to my own roots as a granddaughter of Holocaust refugees. Serendipitously, it also led me to my future career. I got my first personal history contract in 1996 writing the memoir of a famous Mexican philanthropist. In 1997, I formally began Life History Services, an oral and personal history production company. My work includes both writing memoirs, and producing audio, video, and multimedia archives for individuals and families. Another large part of my work is producing larger oral history archives for state institutions, historical societies, communities, and organizations (businesses, congregations, synagogues.) Currently, I am working for the University of Wisconsin on a political oral history archive of Wisconsin Congressman David R. Obey. I’m also producing an oral history archive for New York State Archives on the last fifty years of Federal Education Policy.

Anita Norman (Oral History Intensive, 2024) discovered the outdoors by way of tomatoes from her grandmother’s garden in Little Rock, Arkansas. When she bit into the homegrown produce — cucumbers, spring onions, greens, and the like — life was never the same. Her fascination with her family’s lineage and land stewardship in the southern United States will be the focus of a audio-visual digital archive she will continue to develop at OHSS. She is a curriculum writer and program manager for an education nonprofit in New York City and forever a storyteller. Ask her about matcha, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, and her favorite Aretha Franklin songs.

Anita Rivera (Oral History & Writing 2019) I am a Bronx native who has worked as an educator in New York City and Westchester for 22 years. I have an MA from Teachers College at Columbia University, and I teach English, ESL, and AVID at Fox Lane High School in Bedford, NY. As an AVID teacher, I mentor students from underserved communities, so they can access higher education. I use storytelling to develop resiliency and counter the social alienation that my students experience because of poverty, segregation and their absorption into virtual worlds. My work with oral history has evolved from having adolescents write and tell their own coming of age stories to interviewing family members and bridging the intergenerational gap. Students have learned about their parents’ experiences with abandonment and homelessness, a grandfather’s journey around the world as a 16-year-old merchant marine, the story of a poor and fatherless farm boy with limited prospects who turned one game into a pro football career, and the story of a young mother’s last day with her child before she emigrated to the United States. Oral history work is alive and involves students in observation and action, which are the enemies of intolerance and indifference.

Anita Simansky (Shaking the Family Tree 2019) Anita retired this year after 34 years as a teacher and counselor in the public schools, beginning in MIlwaukee, WI and ending in Madison, where she still lives. She has been a peace and justice activist since her early teens, during the Vietnam War. In recent years, Anita’s activism has focused mainly on education, racism and labor struggles. She is currently part of a team that is planning and organizing Madison’s first Black Lives Matter National Week of Action in the Schools. Anita’s work in schools gave her the opportunity to know students and families of a wide range of backgrounds, and to hear countless stories of their struggles, traumas and triumphs. She has been lifted up, over and over again, by their creativity, love and insight, as well as the sheer hard work and persistence it often takes to survive in this world. These stories, combined with her own family history as granddaughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and her belief that knowing history is crucial to understanding our present circumstances, have brought her to this oral history training. She wants to help collect the deeper, personal stories and perspectives of those affected by recent incidents of anti-semitism, from Pittsburgh to Baraboo, Wi. She is especially interested in the role of allies standing up to this and other forms of white supremacy. She hopes documenting these stories will provide an invaluable resource for reflection and understanding in the future. Anita is also excited to be back near the Catskill mountains for this training, as this is where she fell in love with nature, as a young child growing up in NYC, who got to escape to the “country” in the summer.

Ann Chen (Oral History Intensive, 2024) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and educator living between Brooklyn and Taipei. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Logic Magazine and National Geographic Newsroom. She has taught at NYU Shanghai, NYU and The New School, Parsons School of Design. She received a BA from Wesleyan University and an MPS from ITP at NYU. Her work and research often centers human and environment relationships. She is a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Innovation at USC and a former National-Geographic Fulbright Digital Storytelling Fellow.

Anna Gurton-Wachter (OHSS Intensive 2016) is an archivist, editor and writer. She works full time as the sole archivist for The Keith Haring Foundation. In other parts of her life she is a co-editor and bookmaker of poetry chapbooks with DoubleCross Press. Her own writing has been published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, The Brooklyn Rail, Publication Studio, The Organism for Poetic Research and more. She is interested in film, history, waste, science fiction, hoarding, art and material culture. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Anna Levy (C&C 2015): For seven years, I have been involved in historical memory, inter-generational dialogue, and oral history and human rights initiatives. I've mostly worked on questions of inherited historical memory (memories people have about experiences they did not live through) after collective trauma, transition, or exile -- and how different symbols, traditions (including music) speak to those memories in ways that is invisible or unclear to others. This work has manifest in US foreign policy legacies, in Palestine-Israel, in Central America and first nations in the United States. I completed a Master's degree in public policy and international development, only to complete fieldwork courses in Oral History at Columbia University's Oral History Master's program. My full-time work has been focused on various facets of policy related to poverty, innovation, surveillance, political rights, and urban planning. I have designed and facilitated more than ten experiential education exchanges in the US and overseas. My work and living experience extends from Jordan to Nicaragua to Kenya to the Philippines. I am most interested in political and economic transitions, the role of stories across generations, and how these different stories or perspectives of a single event shape policy of all kinds for many years to come. In the US, the conversation about race and legacies of slavery is the most obvious example.

Anna Samuels (OHSS Intensive 2014) is a freelance writer and audio editor living in Pittsburgh, PA. After receiving her BA in English Literature from the University of Puget Sound, she worked with the Washington State Legacy Project, during which time she conducted two extensive oral history interviews with local centenarians. Anna currently volunteers with the Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh Oral History Initiative, recording stories, editing audio, and drafting short form biographies. This January, she participated in the Transom Online Workshop, a seven-week multi-media storytelling course, and produced a number of short pieces. When she’s not trolling for stories, befriending neighborhood cats, or whittling down her “to-read” list, Anna works in the telephone reference department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. She is particularly interested in the power of community conversation, the ways in which narratives shape shared experiences, and public drinking spaces as storytelling incubators.

Anna Van Dine (Oral History & Writing 2019) Anna is an undergraduate student at NYU Gallatin where her studies incorporate journalistic work and ethnographic methodologies, a love of oral history, everyday artifacts, and the conviction that everything is interesting when you look at it right. Anna believes strongly in the power of listening and values ordinary histories, which she translates into her work in radio and podcasting at places like StoryCorps, VPR, and WNYU. When she was small, she told her mom that when she grew up she wanted to travel around and record old people — now she knows that's a real job! What drives her is preserving — and making people interested in — things that might be otherwise lost or unknown. She hopes to do this in some capacity after she graduates.

Anne Ribbert (OHSS Intensive 2014): I am passionate about life stories and journalistic projects concerned with storytelling. I have carried out a project on life stories of people living in the border region between the Netherlands and Germany, which I hope to publish this year. I am interested in questions to do with (cultural) identity and I enjoy giving people a voice who are not used to being in the spotlight. During the summer school, I would like to further develop my interview skills and meet inspiring people who share my passion for oral history as well hear stories from the local community.

Annelise Finney (OHSS Intensive 2016) is a recent graduate from Urban Studies program at Barnard College and is currently working as criminal defense investigator in The Bronx, NY. Annelise's studies focus on communal trauma and the way in which communities process and remember crime. While in college, Annelise lived in Managua, Nicaragua and Santiago, Chile studying the dynamic ways in which the citizens of each city memorialized state violence and dealt with monuments to the governments and systems that perpetrated that violence. Annelise's past academic work in combination with her work today, has seeded an interest in reconciliation processes and the powerful role personal stories can play in helping individuals understand others' pain and motivations.

Annick Borquez (November Mini Intensive 2023): I am a substance use and HIV epidemiologist focused on the health of marginalized populations, including people who use drugs, people experiencing homelessness, transgender women and sex workers. I am Mexican-French but my research focuses mostly on the U.S. and the U.S.-Mexico border region, and I’m also lucky to collaborate closely with colleagues in Peru, the UK and Australia. My research examines risks and epidemic dynamics for HIV and overdose, as well as the potential for interventions to reduce their incidence and their implementation. Much of this research involves quantitative methods but I am also very interested in qualitative research and have been integrating these more actively in recent years. In addition, I am interested in expanding from research-driven outputs to community-serving outputs, using interview transcripts, recordings and pictures to create theatre plays, poetry anthologies, photo-exhibitions and other artistic expressions that might help us better understand each other and strengthen communities. I am based in San Diego, California, and I also spend a lot of time in Mexico City and wish I was my roommate’s cat real mum.

Annie Bielski (Oral History & Writing 2019) Annie Bielski is an artist, writer, and performer. Bielski’s paintings, sculpture, and video have been exhibited at NADA (New York), Art Rio (Rio de Janeiro), Burning in Water (NYC), SEPTEMBER (Hudson), Paris London Hong Kong (Chicago), High Tide (Philadelphia), Lodos Gallery (Mexico City), and The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland). Bielski has performed at SEPTEMBER, Basilica Hudson, The Museum of Modern Art, Rachel Uffner Gallery, and CANADA. She has collaborated with musician Jenny Hval and filmmaker/performer Zia Anger and performed across the US and Europe. Her work and performances have been covered by Art News, Hyperallergic, MTV, and The New York Times. She received a BFA with an emphasis in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from the University at Buffalo. Bielski lives and works between New York and New Mexico.

Annie Kierans (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) is a Maritimer happy as a clam to have meandered to the far reaches of Northwest Canada. She works primarily as a documentary filmmaker and support worker. She is interested in working with processes that slow time, heighten presence, and navigate the fault lines of memory.

Annie Reynolds (December Mini Intensive 2021, Program Coordinator 2022 -) work and interests orient around collaborative narrative processes, including oral history, spiritual direction, and dreamwork. Annie works as a program coordinator for Oral History Summer School, a transcriptionist for the Association for Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) Oral History Project, and an oral history interviewer for the Hudson Area Library. As a spiritual director trained with Still Harbor, an organization that centers spiritual care in the pursuit of collective liberation, Annie offers non-directive deep listening and contemplative presence to support others' exploration of the sacred/divine in their lives. She has a background in prison-based arts programming, most recently as Primary Researcher for Arts in Corrections New York State, where she facilitated oral history workshops in NY state prisons. From 2016 - 2021, she was a member of Liberation Literacy, a prison-based writing and reading group in Portland, OR. She holds a BA in anthropology and will begin a dual degree MDiv/MSW program at Union Theological Seminary and Hunter College (Silberman School of Social Work) in the fall of 2024.

Annie Rosenthal (Oral History Intensive 2024) is a writer and journalist in Far West Texas. She spent the last three years as the border reporter at Marfa Public Radio, covering rural communities on both sides of the Rio Grande. At MPR, she also produced a podcast about how living in the region’s isolated desert communities shapes the choices people can make about when, how, or if to become parents. Before that, Annie worked on a bilingual community radio show created to reach people in ICE detention, and as a reporter in small-town Alaska — experiences that sparked her excitement about terrestrial radio and rural community media. She’s interested in creative uses of testimony in both written and oral forms, and the role of collective storytelling in reckoning with violence. She has a BA in American Studies from Yale University, and her essays and longform reporting have appeared in outlets like Politico Magazine, the LA Review of Books, and the Washington Post.

Antoine Guerlain (Mixed/Memory 2015) works in the bakery at Camphill Village Copake, making bread with a group of special needs adults. He's lived in southern Columbia County for 8 years and currently resides with his partner on her farm in the town of Livingston.

April Braden (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a doctoral candidate of American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. She received her Bachelors and Masters in U.S. History from Loyola University Chicago. Her primary academic interests are in U.S. history of the 1970s and 80s, the middle class, vernacular architecture, and urban history. Her dissertation examines the residential and postindustrial built environment of the Canaryville neighborhood in Chicago. It hypothesizes a relationship between the postindustrial environment and class identity formation and is trying to use the physical environment to answer the question, “why does everyone think they are middle class?” Her interest in oral history stems from her background in Public History, along with a healthy influence of storytelling through public radio. She currently lives in Chicago with her spouse, 1 year old son, and two cats.

April Rosenblum (OHSS Intensive 2021) is a white Jewish writer and activist whose work focuses on race, class, Jewish identity and movement building in the 20th century. Her essays have been featured in The Washington Post, Haaretz and Jewish Currents. As a child of white Jewish activists in Philadelphia, April was raised in the city’s movements for peace, economic and racial justice during a period of intensifying policing and incarceration in the Black community where she lived. Her work against police brutality, political imprisonment and for anti-racist education grew out of the skills and history she learned from veteran local Black Power and human rights organizers, and from the Jewish family stories passed down by her parents. April is interested in how relations of domination reproduce themselves in political, communal and interpersonal life. She is known for writing about complex issues with sensitivity to people on many sides of conflicts. She is at work on a microhistory of Black/Jewish interconnection in the twentieth century United States.

Ariana Faye Allensworth (Building Your Own Transcription Style Guide 2024) is a cultural worker committed to building community power through participatory art, design, and research. She currently works as a Design Director at global design and innovation firm IDEO and helps run the New York City chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a research and digital media collective that documents displacement and crafts tools for resistance in solidarity with gentrifying communities. She's currently developing a new body of work about Allensworth, CA, a once Black utopia and the state's first town founded by and for Black Americans.

Ariel Hahn (Doc Film 2013) I’ve been working in radio and telling stories (or trying to) on film since 2005. At the moment, I’m working on a project at National Public Radio — using archival audio to tell the story of the organization and their approach to the news. I’m also aiding a Brooklyn based filmmaker with some archiving projects while trying to edit my own films and think about new ways to experiment with narrative storytelling. I’m very interested in bringing the gap between my on-air radio experience (mostly music based throughout college) , my behind the scenes audio editing, and my love for telling stories (on film and through sound). I haven’t had many opportunities to explore audio storytelling, especially in longer formats, and it is something I’d like to learn how to do. I also consider myself a one-day-academic who would like to pull from oral storytelling to expand on narratives about traumatic events in history. Specific areas that interest me range from family stories (mainly my own about Arizona before it became a state) to narratives about hoarding and obsession to coming out and issues about sexuality to power and control to historical topics related to violence and the Gothic.

Ariel (Ari) Mejia (October Intensive 2022) is the Audio and Community Storytelling Producer for Vocalo Radio in Chicago, her hometown. Previously, she taught youth radio at After School Matters and independently developed and hosted Mirror and a Flashlight, a podcast from the Chicago Women’s Health Center, and Unboxing Queer History, a podcast from Gerber/Hart, the Midwest LGBTQ Library and Archives. Her audio has been featured on Short Cuts, The Heart, The Dig, Change Agents, and Bird Note. In addition to her work as a producer, oral historian, and audio artist Ari plays guitar and makes wheel-thrown ceramics. She identifies as a kitchen witch and also dabbles in candle magic.

Ariel Pang (they/them) (Project Design Lab 2024) who also exhibits work under the moniker "Ariel /" and "Air Presents," is a performer and director who has been formally bringing people together to make live works of art that push the confines of medium and aesthetic since attending Lehman College, where they obtained a BFA in Multimedia Performance in 2018. As an artist who began in visual media to eventually pursue a higher education in the performing arts, they were exposed to a myriad of approaches for different kinds of performance art that they blended with their sensibility for material. Fascinated by the way legacies of performance practice reflect the cultural structures they uphold, Ariel traces these lineages to investigate the transactional relationships between performers and audiences, or practitioners and witnesses. They are especially interested in the heritage of marginalized populations, like immigrants, for the enrichment towards a more informed, inclusive theatrical context. They consider the theatrical context very important, as it affords the transformative experience of collective meaning-making or world building.

Arlette Hernandez (she/her) (Oral History Intensive 2024) is an Associate Educator at The Museum of Modern Art. Her role at MoMA focuses on producing audio interviews to help connect visitors with art and artists. Outside of work, she is a filmmaker interested in producing creative archival works. Arlette is fascinated by the idea of the “underground” and how artists working in these spaces use their craft to explore and celebrate alternative ways of living. Her creative practice is dedicated to documenting, preserving, and celebrating the stories of people and communities who have historically been excluded from the archive. In her free time, Arlette enjoys reading comics, watching horror films, making pottery, and petting dogs.

Arwa Alhoribi (Oral History for Educators 2019) Hi! My name is Arwa. I was raised between the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, and have lived in New York for the past 9 years. I've worked in public education institutions for the past five years. For several years I was a college counselor in public high schools with historically low college-going rates. Currently I work as an academic counselor for a support program called ASAP at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, NY. I have a master's in educational leadership and a bachelor's in gender, race and sexuality studies. I'm currently working on: leveling up my capacity to ask good questions, to listen, to hold space for others, to write (and publish!) , to facilitate conversation, to live more courageously and to heal. I really enjoy hot sauce.

Arya Samuelson (OHSS Intensive 2014) is a recent graduate of Reed College, where she studied cultural anthropology with an emphasis on gender studies and development. She currently lives in New York City and works at Neighbors Together, a community-based organization in Brownsville, Brooklyn, helping chronically homeless folks with mental illnesses secure housing in New York City. Her passions are broad and encompass sexual and interpersonal violence advocacy, international human rights, nonviolence, creative writing & literature and the question of how to strengthen activism through arts-based initiatives. She eventually hopes to work internationally with human rights initiatives through a grassroots, community-informed approach.

Aubyn O’Grady: (Project Design Lab 2024) Aubyn O’Grady’s work is performative, socially-oriented, and aspires to create and re-make forms of community in the place she lives. Aubyn is a frequent and enthusiastic collaborator and has co-produced many art events and projects. She can be solely credited with conceptualising the League of Lady Wrestlers (2013-2017 Dawson City, Montreal, Toronto, Victoria, and Fairbanks), the Swimming Lessons Aquatic Lecture series (2017-2018 Dawson City, YT, and Toronto, ON), Local Field School (2020+, Dawson City), and Drawlidays (2019, 2020, 2021), a semi-annual, Dawson City-wide portrait exchange. Though her work is rarely meant to travel, documentation of Aubyn’s projects have been featured in exhibitions at the Younger Than Beyonce Gallery (ON, Canada), the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (ON, Canada), and the ODD Gallery (YT, Canada). Her work has also been the subject of a documentary; The League of Lady Wrestlers (2018), directed by Amy Siegel. Born in Pembroke, Ontario, Canada Aubyn is now a guest on Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Territory in Dawson City, Yukon. She is an alumnus of the Yukon School of Visual Arts Foundation Year Program, where she has held the Program Director position since 2018. Aubyn holds a PhD in Curriculum & Pedagogy from the University of Toronto.

Aurelie Campbell (Song Collecting and Composing 2023): I am a multi-media advocate and Human Ecology student at New College of Florida. I am currently working on my senior thesis looking at the Queer Jamaican Diaspora, which looks at elements of my own identity but also involves a series of interviews I will turn into an oral history performance in Spring of 2024. I’ve produced shows and episodes for Fogartyville Radio in Sarasota, Florida, such as two seasons of my show "The Black History Month Listen-in," and episodes for their “Critical Times News” series as a student reporter. I’ve worked in community outreach and organizing efforts at my university in community roles such as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Co-Chair for my Student Government and a Resident Advisor role in student administration. I am currently a community organizing intern for the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project.

Avital Smotrich-Barr (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023): I am currently working as a content coordinator at an exhibit design firm and have done other work in museum and similar public history contexts around narrative storytelling. I received my undergraduate degree in History and Mechanical Engineering from Yale University. I've done some oral history work in both undergrad and my current position and am excited to expand that practice! I have a soft spot for podcasts and museums. In my free time I also enjoy puzzles (of all kinds) and finding any excuse I can to spend outside running, biking or reading.

Asa Lipman Mendelsohn (OHSS Intensive 2021) is an artist, writer, and teacher. Asa’s writing has been published by Social Text, The Brooklyn Rail, Sounding Out!, and dérive: Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung, among others, and included in collections published by The University of Chicago Press, Golden Spike Press, AREA Chicago, and multiple artist monographs. Screenings and performances include the Contour Biennale, Argos - Center for Art and Media, Ji.hlava IDFF (main award, First Lights for Aphasia, a collaboration with Jelena Jureša); Anthology Film Archives, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, The Blanton Museum of Art at UT Austin, Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz, and Kunsthalle Wien. Asa is a former Fulbright Fellow, a Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow, and a Teaching Artist Fellow at the Center for Urban Pedagogy; currently learning and teaching as a lecturer in critical gender studies at the University of California, San Diego and a member of the Cops off Campus Coalition.

Ashraya Gupta (Oral History for Educators 2019) Ashraya Gupta has taught science in New York City public schools for almost a decade. A Math for America Master Teacher, she teaches upper house science at Harvest Collegiate High School, where her courses include Climate Justice and the Artist as Chemist. She serves as faculty advisor for the school newspaper, the Harvest Tribune, and is interested in how storytelling connects to the work of scientists and the lives of students. She seeks to connect science education to the urban environment and enjoys leading students on camping trips and other outdoor learning opportunities.

Atim George (Experimental Ethnographies 2018): Atim is a retired diplomat, grandmother and doctoral student in the Antioch University Graduate School of Leadership and Change. A global citizen, Atim is concerned about the world's vulnerable and exploited, especially women and children. She is a storyteller and student of world mythology. Atim loves Star Trek (especially, Next Generation) and is prepared to play Trek Trivia with any other interested parties. Atim comes to OHSS 2018 with a desire to learn about audio-recording, editing, interviewing and podcasting. Make art not war!

Audrey Berman (Shaking the Family Tree 2019) Audrey lives in Germantown, NY and moved to the Hudson Valley six years ago to purse a second career in agriculture a few years after graduating from The Cooper Union School of Architecture. Initially apprenticing and managing small-scale diversified organic vegetable farms, Audrey now runs Long Table Harvest, a non-profit committed to social and economic equality in the local food system and is part of the Rolling Grocer 19 team, a new initiative offering a full-service grocery store that sells food using a sliding-scale sales model in the city of Hudson. Audrey is the child of Soviet-Jewish immigrants, and has been exploring the loss of their family's culture and traditions through assimilation and Communism.

Avery Lamb (OHSS Intensive 2015, C&C 2015) is a recent graduate of Bard College, where she studied Human Rights and Written Arts, specifically research on medical relief and public health as well as journalism. Her interests include the intersection of health and human rights, radio, writing, and other forms of documentation, migration studies, and art as activism. Her undergraduate thesis was a reflection on three trips to Haiti, and illustrated some of the obstacles in monitoring the adherence of non-governmental organizations to rights based principles. Avery is a co-founder of The Draft, an interdisciplinary student journal out of Bard College, and has worked as a research assistant at the Human Rights Project at Bard College and at Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees in Brooklyn, NY.

Aviva Silverman (October Intensive 2022) is an artist, activist and co-coordinator of the NYC Trans Oral History Project— a community led archive devoted to the collection, preservation and sharing of trans histories. The collective’s archive will be permanently collected by the New York Public Library’s Special Collections and is working on a forthcoming anthology published by Haymarket Books. Aviva also works in sculpture and performance. Their work explores objects, images and bodies that have been understood as vessels for divine information within interlacing histories of art and religion. Recent work takes the form of intricate dioramas utilizing miniatures, blown glass, and industrially produced religious memorabilia. Through a dynamic study of Americana, Catholic iconography and Judaic mythology — Silverman examines how and through what histories faith, incomprehensibility and the sacred becoming embodied, gendered and mass produced. Silverman has exhibited at numerous galleries and museums including MoMA P.S.1, Atlanta Contemporary, and the Swiss Institute. Their work has appeared in Artforum, The New Yorker, BBC Radio, Art in America, Flash Art, and Art Papers.

Austin Miles (October Mini Intensive 2021) grew in southeast Ohio. He's currently a land stewardship and community engagement coordinator with the Charles River Conservancy in Boston, where he supports the conservancy's work to protect the urban parklands in the Charles River Basin. He earned his B.S. in Ecology and an M.S. in Environmental Sciences, but also studied folklore as a minor during his master's. Since, he's been interested in the public and environmental humanities and environmental work that is community co-designed, participatory, and collaborative. He's particularly interested in the possible intersections between vernacular ecologies and environmental conservation and restoration.

Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (Ayinsko: he/they/li) (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) does what it takes, using voice to shift culture, engaging with communities of listening, memory-making, and movement. The form shifts as needed -- the participatory media popup DuSable City, the multiplatform XR dance work Against Gravity with Renegade Performance Group, the online creative sousou Someplace Like Home, the experi(m)ent(i)al podcapsule trance-mission DrumLanguage (2013-16), occasional acts of journalism. In recent years this work has been supported by the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the City of Evanston, CCCADI, VOQAL & the Center for Cultural Power. Ayinsko has also served as a multiformat arts presenter with Brooklyn Museum, Haiti Cultural Exchange, City Lore, DuSable Museum, the University of Chicago, Old Town School of Folk Music, Bowery Poetry Club & more, as well as in advisory & solidarity roles with Let Us Breathe Collective & Honey Pot Performance.

Ayla Gelsinger (October Intensive 2022): I majored in Communication Studies and Psychology during my undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I am currently in my second year of my Master of Social Work degree at Columbia University where I am focusing on the impact that mandated reporting has on child trauma survivors. I hope to learn more about Oral History practices and plan to spend my time bearing witness to and sharing stories of childhood survivors of trauma to build community and inform change.

Barkey Powell (OHSS Intensive 2014): I am currently working as a merchandiser/sales associate at Caren Forbes & Co in New Canaan, Ct, as well as a freelance photographer for Hearst Media Group. While raising my four sons I was a freelance writer/photographer for New Canaan Patch, a project manager for the publishing of ‘Living With What You Love’ by Monica Kosann, as well as a longtime volunteer with Voices of September 11th and many school related organizations. Continuing education included photography classes at Silvermine Art School and recently an oral history seminar at Columbia University. Free time is spent reading, writing, running, golfing and skiing with day trips to NYC for style and design inspiration, as well as gallery hopping.

Batul Abbas (Shaking the Family Tree 2019) I’ve worked as a garden designer in the Hamptons, a legal assistant in financial services in NYC, and volunteer translator & editor. I’m always pursuing projects in illustration & storytelling, and am passionate about the use of drawing as a tool for thinking, visualizing, feeling, and revealing. I graduated from the University of Virginia with a master’s degree in landscape architecture, where I learned how to think through drawing & develop design narratives. While at UVA, I created collective drawings & conducted narrative fieldwork in Mexico City, and in the Dakotas, Iowa, and Illinois along the Dakota Access Pipeline. I’m passionate about all things related to language, drawing, and storytelling, and am currently based in the New York City area.

Ben Houston (OHSS “Talking White” 2022) is Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University in the UK where he researches and teaches 20th century US history, with a particular focus on the African American freedom struggle and post-1945 US and Southern history, plus oral and public history. Before moving to Newcastle in January 2010, he served as director of the Remembering African American Pittsburgh (RAP) oral history project, sponsored by the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ben Lander (OHSS Intensive 2012, Archive 2013): I teach history and social science research methodology courses at a college in Montreal. I took part in last years OHSS along with a colleague and fellow archive workshop participant, Mark Beauchamp, with the intention of bringing what we had learnt back to the classroom. Over the year Mark and I have developed and delivered a course on oral history to about 150 students and have collected c300 oral histories. The course went well, but now we have pretty much no idea what to do with the recordings that are currently stored on two hard drives wrapped in a cloth in our office drawer. We are pretty certain that this isn’t anyone’s idea of a best practice and are attending this workshop to find out how to move forward with our project.

Beth Beckman (OHSS Intensive 2015): I am a strategist, illustrator, and UX researcher. My specialty is emotional journey mapping. I’m interested in amateur genealogy, how collective identities form, and dissecting celebrity gossip. Currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

Beth Cleary (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016): I am the co-founder of the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul, MN, a new kind of library focused on labor, immigration, and social justice histories. ESFL hosts artists and researchers, shows films, provides space to teachers, labor groups, theatre companies, refugee weaving collectives--all pulling together in what we call the work of freedom. 'Story' is at the core of what ESFL supports, and as a new organization we are poised to gather and record many stories, in many languages, to document the neighborhood. I also teach theatre at the college level, and am preparing a devised project about the "emotional labors" of nurses and personal caregivers, based on interviews the students and I will conduct in the Twin Cities.

Beverly Bhaangi (OHSS Intensive 2021) is passionate about mounting creative challenges to unjust narratives of history, identity and community. She believes civic engagement is inspired when history is taken to the public sphere in multiple forms - artistic, literary, audio-visual; created collaboratively and shared freely. She dreams of helping to build informed communities who think critically and compassionately about conceptions of citizenship and belonging. Beverly is a third-culture kid based in the Kingdom of Bahrain who has moved between numerous cities from a young age. She is an alumnus of Bennington College, The New School and holds a Master’s degree in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Bianca Mońa (OHSS Intensive 2018) is a lover of the arts. As an arts administrator, curator, educator, advocate, and artist, she has initiated a number of projects at institutions such as Studio Museum in Harlem and The John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Most recently she served as the Public Programmes and Development Manager at Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she developed exhibitions, lectures, and workshops to further engage on how the camera can be used as a tool of resistance and reform. All of her artistic endeavors center on a greater understanding of contemporary Africa and her Diaspora including her writings which chronicle her adventures living on the Continent. In addition, she is particularly keen on investigative projects that tackle the living history of regular citizens who negotiate grand topics such as gender, heritage, and social-economic placement. As the founder of the Newark Black Artists Oral History Project she has exhibited these audio recordings throughout the New York Tri-State area. Inspired by her living and traveling experiences throughout Africa, Bianca continues to build partnership that highlight the contemporary happenings of Africa. Ms. Mońa is currently an Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellow at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute and holds a bachelor’s degree in arts administration from Dillard University, two master’s degrees (art education and interdisciplinary studies) from San Jose State University and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Brad Kohl (April Mini-Intensive 2021) has been teaching math for thirty years. Having worked in both nontraditional and college prep programs, he loves the different faces and stories that come into his life. He’s designed several hands-on programs over the years and was inspired by his students to create Community-Based Research in Mathematics, a social justice-based program that pairs high school students with nonprofits to engage in research initiatives. Brad has also been preaching part time at his mother’s church during the pandemic, creating hybrid services. This new adventure has given him the chance to look at life through a different lens. He’s also gay, on the autism spectrum, and someone who has experienced Stage IV cancer and treated it holistically. His life is one of faith and stories, both his own and those he has been gifted by others.

Brandi Collins-Dexter (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) is the Schuster Media and Technology Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and a Research Fellow at the National Center On Race & Digital Justice. As former Senior Campaign Director of media, culture, and economic justice at Color Of Change, she led several successful and highly visible campaigns for corporate and government accountability and worked extensively with Silicon Valley companies on key corporate policy changes. Collins-Dexter has testified in front of Congress on corporate concentration, online privacy, racialized surveillance, and information integrity. Her critically acclaimed book Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future explores Black political, economic, and social power in the US. She is developing a podcast and education series on 1980s-era media, cultural spaces, and politics in Chicago and their impact on modern national politics. Brandi holds a B.A. in history from Agnes Scott College and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. She currently lives in Baltimore, MD.

Bree Bogle: (December Mini Intensive 2021) My name is Bree Bogle. I am 21 years old. I am senior at Bard College pursuing my Bachelor's of Arts in Global and International studies. I am writing my senior thesis on Jamaican migration. Through my work I will honor the rich culture that Jamaicans bring to New York City , and in keeping with the tradition of oral history I would like to create a collection of stories of the Jamaican experience in NYC.

Brenda Lindfors (November Mini Intensive 2023): I have 20+ years of experience leading marketing and communications activities for nonprofit organizations focused on human growth, capacity-building, inclusion and connection. I am passionate about people, their stories and experiences. Other areas of interest include photography, videography, design, and the visual arts. I am interested in engaging and connecting with others to understand how they see the world and their place in it.

Brendan Paholak: (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) I grew up in Triform Camphill Community located in Columbia county. After finishing High school, I spent almost a decade working in fermentation, making sauerkraut and hot sauce for Poor Devil Pepper Co. and Hawthorne Valley sauerkraut. I worked in a social therapeutic setting at Barrington Stage in the Playwright Mentoring Project as a peer mentor in the after school program and also worked with people with special needs working on a farm and teaching watercolor painting. In 2021, I decided to enroll in Columbia-Greene Community College, feeling for the first time that I was ready to pursue higher education. Over the last two years I have gained a greater sense of self-awareness and purpose, and have become more confident in my narrative both personally and academically. In the fall, I will be continuing my education at Bard College where I know the curriculum will surprise me, challenge me, inspire me, and push me to think outside the limitations I have set upon myself. By continuing my education, I hope to develop a professional career that has a strong community impulse centered on sustainability, the arts, and bringing people together to have fun and feel accepted for who they are.

Brian Fuhr (OHSS Intensive 2016): I'm a storyteller and a digital strategist. I like to tell stories that inform, inspire, and move people. I work in the advertising and marketing industry. My clients are businesses eager to tell their stories in new ways through new mediums. I write digital strategies for them in order to maximize the value of communication between brands and audiences. I've seen the limits of technology in creating meaningful connections, and so I am pursuing a new direction in my career. I'm hoping oral history will introduce me to new methods of capturing and sharing human experiences.

Brianna Paoli (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) I am recent MSLIS graduate with a Certificate in Archives and Records Management. After working in libraries for 8 years, I developed an interest for local and oral history. I am passionate about public history and education, and I am looking forward to learning more about oral history!

Britt Dahlberg (Oral History & Writing 2019) Britt Dahlberg has worked across and in gaps between fields for fifteen years, using ethnographic research to open dialogues and form connections. Her formal PhD training is as an anthropologist of science and medicine. Her work has explored experiences of older adults around depression, aging, and primary care; and ways people make sense of environmental risk in context of late industrial northeastern United States. She is currently working on a book project that seeks to integrate oral histories with ethnographic research around experiences of place, race, and environmental risk. When ethnographic research helped her notice the need for other discussions not happening in existing forms of public engagement in science, she worked with oral historians, residents, and playwrights to create an oral history collection that became basis of short plays, as well as basis of experience-based public programs, materials for classrooms, and focus of an undergraduate class she recently taught. She currently works as Director of the Center for Applied History at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia (a space for scholarship on history and anthropology of science, used as basis of generating public experiences and dialogues), and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University.

Britta Nelson (OHSS Intensive 2015) is a native of Northern Germany. Over the last 20 years, she has lived in Berkeley, CA, and Brooklyn, NY, and lives now with her family near Boston, MA. Britta used to work as Human Resources specialist, mainly involved in training and teaching, and has earned a degree in Art History and Psychology while in Berkeley and New York. While raising her children she has been involved in editing, as well as working for a start up company offering services to the German speaking expatriate community of greater New York. Currently, Britta is involved with a number of non profit organizations, organizing fundraisers in New York that aim to help children, helping to build schools in Central America, organizing a stove project for Guatemala, helping at a local hospice as well as a being involved with a local project that supports women in need. Britta has been a passionate listener to the StoryCorps installments on NPR for many years. She is fascinated by giving people the opportunity to preserve their life stories. Britta is currently in the planning process of building an organization that will create the opportunity for people nearing the end of their lives to tell their story, using the recorded material to create a videography for family and friends so that life lessons and experiences can be passed on.

Bruce Downey (Oral History for Educators 2019) I am 66 years old, live in the country in a log house with my partner Elinor Rush. We have three children all of whom are married and live in nearby Kingston. We have a 2 year old grandchild - Esther- and another due mid February. I come from a family with strong rural ties and have 6 siblings. For the past 40 years I've had an architectural practice in Kingston where I worked on small and large scale projects and am mainly known for my work with heritage properties. I sat on the Kingston Heritage Committee for 30 years. I enjoy music, playing banjo and sing in a 120 voice choir - Open Voices - which I helped form 16 years ago. El and I are involved as volunteers in various local organizations such as a property in Kingston serving the needs of various groups and organizations with meeting space, Live Wire Music Series, and Blue Skies Music Festival. We have rental properties in Kingston which keeps us in touch with students attending Queen's University.

Bryan Cockrell (Oral History for Educators 2019) Bryan Cockrell is an English as a New Language teacher at Knowledge and Power Preparatory Academy International High School in the Bronx. As an educator of English language learners, he is interested in creating space for multiple modalities of communicating and storytelling by students, their families, and their wider communities. As an archaeologist and former museum worker, Bryan wonders how sound can play a role in understanding past lives. Over time, he has come to think more carefully about who is telling stories, for whom, and the overall power dynamics of storytelling and research.

Cara Turett (OHSS Intensive 2013) is a graphic designer, artist, teacher and aspiring carpenter living in Hudson, NY. Her design work focuses on supporting community based businesses and non-profit organizations, often combining handcrafted imagery with digital tools. Her art focuses on collections and the ways that objects tells stories and hold memories. Cara has always been an enthusiastic listener and observer. She has taught children’s art and environmental education classes in Hudson, New York City and Ohio and is currently teaching young women at a local detention facility. She is also learning carpentry and boatbuilding. She holds a BA from Oberlin College in Art and Environmental Studies.

Carlos Espinal (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) I am a Graduate Student in Spanish at the Graduate Center and work mostly with written archives. This has made me think about the practice of archiving in relation to my non-academic interests in activism, art, etc. On my free time I enjoy biking around the city and taking care of my plants.

Carol McKirdy (Radio 2013): As a professional oral historian I have worked on several large-scale oral history projects in Australia and also with individual interviewees. I have applied oral histories to educational curriculum, on websites, for the recording of community history and as supplementary history. I have presented papers at several international conferences. My website summaries my experiences as an oral historian:www.historyherstory.com.au My greatest passion in oral history is the preservation of the history of ordinary people. As well I am a qualified adult educator working in the tertiary sector with educationally disadvantaged adults.

Carolyn Fraser (OHSS Intensive 2021) is a Melbourne-based exhibitions curator, writer and letterpress printer. In 2005, after eleven years in the US, she shipped a 20ft container of letterpress equipment to Melbourne and re-established Idlewild Press. Her fine press books are in national and international collections, including the State Library Victoria, the New York Public Library, Yale University and the Library of Congress. Carolyn is a regular contributor to Uppercase magazine, writing predominantly about social history topics with a specialty in the history and culture of craft practices. Her writing has also appeared in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, and on the Etsy blog. She is a regular guest on radio and podcasts, including Evenings with David Astle on ABC Melbourne and the Herald Sun’s Black & White podcast. Carolyn is Senior Curator at the State Library Victoria. Her most recent exhibition was Velvet, Iron, Ashes, the inaugural show in the library’s new Victoria Gallery. Before COVID-19 forced the library’s closure, the exhibition was on track to break State Library Victoria exhibition attendance records.

Cassandra Marsillo (Experimental Ethnographies 2018): Cassandra is a multi-disciplinary artist and oral historian. She is completing her masters in Public History at Carleton, after having completed two bachelors at Concordia in Studio Arts and Italian, as well as Honours Public History. Her art is about nostalgia, imagining and remembering, and sometimes imagining memories. Her historical interests included the study of the formation of national narratives, identity, collective memory, magic, folklore and superstition, and the role of mapping and the imaginary in history. In addition to making art and writing essays, she enjoys working with students, promoting interdisciplinarity and creativity in hands-on and interactive education.

Catherine Banks Baum (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) joins the Oral History Summer School with a background in running experiential education programs on tall ships. Born and raised in Western Massachusetts, Catherine graduated from Bard College in 2020 with a BA in Human Rights and History. Most recently, Catherine spent 13 months living and working full time onboard the Schooner Roseway as an educator and deckhand sailing between Boston, MA and St. Croix, USVI. Presently, Catherine is the Sailing Program Manager at Rocking the Boat in the Bronx.

Catherine Epstein (December Mini Intensive 2021) grew up in Massachusetts and is currently based in Virginia. She has spent the last eight years as a middle and high school Humanities teacher in Boston, where she also directed her school's theater program. Previous to her work in the classroom, Catherine worked as a public radio producer, a freelance writer, and a museum educator. In 2017, she received a Margot Stern Strom Innovation Grant from Facing History and Ourselves for a correspondence project exploring political differences between her students in Boston and a junior high class in Ozark, Arkansas. In addition to her work in education, she is currently a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, supported by the Stanford Calderwood Fund for New American Plays, at the Huntington Theatre Company.

Cathlin Goulding (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) is a curriculum specialist and researcher of place, pedagogy, and historical violence. She started in the education field as an English and poetry teacher at a public high school in the East San Francisco Bay Area. Her research focuses broadly on education and public memory in post-conflict settings. She examines immersive educational experiences in concentration camps and other sites exhibiting ""difficult"" pasts. As the daughter and granddaughter of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, the history and reverberations of the concentration camp are key areas of her research and writings. She recently completed a Mellon postdoctoral research fellow at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. During her time at the Museum, she documented the spatial pedagogies of memorial museums and teachers' approaches to integrating 9/11 into their curriculum. Her latest project is Yuri, an organization that provides educational resources and experiences through an Asian American lens.

Cathleen Antoine-Abiala (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) Cathleen M. Antoine is an educator from NYC with over 15 years experience as a classroom practitioner. Her career has primarily focused on English Language Arts but she has incorporated the arts and social activism as well in her pedagogy. Partnering and collaborating with institutions such as Weeksville Heritage Center, the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College and Urban Word, she recognizes the vital role that creative expression plays in learning and as a part of culturally responsive practice. She holds a masters degree in Sociology of Education from Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Cathleen is the Executive Producer and Writer of the award-winning short documentary, African Odyssey: Ancestral Memories (2017)

Cecilia Berkovic (Oral History for Organizations 2021) is a queer visual artist and graphic designer living and working in Toronto. She mostly designs books and is part of feminist working group, Emilia-Amalia. She studies at the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute and is curious about the creative, personal and political potential of shared oral histories and storytelling.

Chance Grable (OHSS intensive 2016) is an undergraduate history major at University of California, Berkeley. His studies focus on US history with an emphasis on social movements. Chance augments his studies through participation in contemporary social justice movements. In particular, Chance has contributed to the movement against incarceration and the various social and political dynamics that enable the mass incarceration system to exist. Throughout the summer, Chance will be conducting research on the relationship between mass incarceration and deindustrialization in Youngstown, Ohio. In addition to archival sources, Chance will rely on oral history to examine how mass incarceration and deindustrialization were experienced and responded to by the people most impacted by these two processes.

Charlotte Cleary (OHSS intensive 2016): I am a (fairly) recent graduate who studied visual art, and multimedia journalism at Sarah Lawrence who is looking to break into the field of oral history. I currently work for a VR company, and live in NYC.

Charulata Dyal (November Mini Intensive 2023) is a doctoral student in NYU Steinhardt's Teaching and Learning Department with a focus on urban education. She has a background in both fine arts and education. Charulata has worked in higher education in various capacities in the last 20 years. She has taught photography, writing, and English to teens and adults. She is the founder and director of an arts-based community education program in NYC. She is also a faculty instructor at LIU teaching ESOL and on occasion, photography. Her areas of interest include educational nonprofits and the arts. Charulata holds an MFA in Creative Writing, MFA in Media Arts Theory and Photography, and a BA in Journalism.

Chelle Francis (Verso Mini Intensive 2019, Oral History & Writing 2019) Chelle is an intellectual property lawyer with 29 years of experience. Starting as a litigator, and then, after working in-house handling global IP enforcement for 20th Century Fox Corp and many other Fox companies in Los Angeles, she came to NY and joined News Corp’s general counsel’s office, where she expanded and led the global IP practice, charged with business strategy, management and protection of the IP assets of the News Corp operating and joint venture companies. In 2009, Chelle started The Francis Company which partners with businesses of all sizes in various industries (including consumer products, media, technology, fitness, publishing, fashion, jewelry, and beverage), uniting IP development/management and monetization with business strategy to create competitive advantages and increase market share for her clients. Chelle is also a co-founder of the cold brew coffee company Red Thread Coffee Co., and a co-owner of a rental house in the south of France. BUT, more recently, Chelle has begun to concentrate in earnest on her long-standing, keen interest in story telling through various means of non-fiction expression, including oral history and writing.

Cherie Sinclair (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) owns and operates Resolution Remedies LLC, an alternative dispute resolution firm with a panel of neutrals in Marin County, California. She is trained as a mediator and has studied the principals of forgiveness and restorative justice. Cherie earned a bachelor’s degree in International Relations/French at University of California, Davis. In addition to its panel of extremely talented and honorable people, Cherie’s company creates an environment that is conducive to resolution. She sees the latter as her role - to inform, facilitate, and even mediate, to pave the way for disputants, attorneys, and mediators to do their best work together, bringing empowerment and relief to people in conflict. Working directly with clients involves creating rapport, earning trust, active listening, and genuine interest. Cherie anticipates developing oral histories with a similar approach. Cherie lives in Sausalito with her two lively and engaging sons, ages 14 and 20. She enjoys getting outdoors, road trips, family gatherings, conversation, yoga, dance, cooking, reading, cinema, and Sundays at the farmer’s market.

Chloe McLaren (OHSS “Talking White” 2022) is the Metadata Projects Librarian at Cornell University Library. She currently works broadly in the institutional repository, manages the library’s streaming video platform, and works on AV accessibility & related metadata. Before becoming a librarian, she worked as a projectionist. She received her MLIS in 2010 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Chloe Zimmerman (Oral History for Educators 2019) Chloe Zimmerman is an artist, writer and educator with an interest in ecologies, alternative pedagogies, and experimental documentary practices across disciplines. She has worked in documentary research and production, and her own creative work spans analogue film, digital video, installation, sound and text. Chloe teaches filmmaking in New York City, as well as online through Soliya, an intercultural nonprofit that focuses on innovative use of new media technologies to shift the way societies resolve their differences. For the past year, she has been volunteering at New Sanctuary Coalition’s asylum clinic and is collaborating on an oral history project with immigrant community members affected by detention and deportation. She previously co-created an oral history of a grassroots organization promoting self-sufficiency among farmers in the Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador. Chloe was a 2013-2014 Collaborative Fellow at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art and is a graduate of the Combined Degree Program between Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Chris Rice (Oral History for Organizations 2021) is the Director of Planning at WXY Studio where he leads community engagement, planning, and design projects. Chris is interested in using the tools of urban planning and design to address racial and social inequities. In 2015, he co-founded BlackSpace, a collective of Black urban planners and designers who demand a present and future, where Black People, Black Spaces, and Black culture matter and thrive. Chris holds a BA from Oberlin College and a Masters in Urban Planning from the Pratt Institute.

Christiana Fizet (OHSS intensive 2016) is currently undertaking her PhD at the University of Edinburgh and is a research student in the Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland. Her research explores Canadian history teacher candidates' understandings of and orientations to Canadian history with a focus on how their identities and experiences shape these views. By asking teacher candidates to 'story' Canadian history according to what they find most significant and then try and draw links to their own backgrounds, she tries to underscore how we are all active makers and shapers of history while at the same time highlighting that certain voices and experiences have been given more space in official history. She comes to the OHSS as an ongoing learner and teacher of history and hopes that she can apply the techniques she learns to her future classrooms.

Christina Abdo (Shaking the Family Tree 2019) Growing up between Beirut, Lebanon and New York, I developed a curiosity for understanding the psyche of cultures and its residents. Being away from my grandparents, I realized how much I didn’t know about their lives, and desired to find ways to bring that out to light. Consequently, I realized many senior citizens don’t have their story told, and began interviewing them in my neighborhood. I’ve made many mistakes along the way and want to explore new ways to interview and record people’s stories in a thoughtful and ethical way. I graduated from NYU Tisch film program and deviated from film work is the past few years. I am very interested in exploring oral history. I think it’s a noble profession and I can’t wait to meet you all!

Christina Bohnsack (OHSS Intensive 2014) is a licensed massage therapist and fifth generation resident of Columbia County. She received her BA in Comparative Religion and International Development from Hartwick College and her AAS in Massage Therapy from Columbia-Greene. The frequent position of professional listening, coupled with observing great changes to her home region over the last generation have created a deep interest in recording and preserving the stories of everyday local people.

Chuck Kaczynski (OHSS Intensive 2017) has taught history at York Preparatory School on Manhattan's Upper West Side since September of 2012. With a special emphasis on teaching the habits of mind of professional historian, he centers his curricula around historical research and expository writing. This year, three of his students' papers were published in journals, two in the United States and one in Shanghai, China. Over the last two years, he has directed a senior-level advanced historical research methods seminar and York Prep's online student research journal. With the OHSS training, he will direct an oral history research seminar for juniors on the experience and lessons of Hurricane Sandy in the 2017-2018 academic year.

Ciera Dudley (April Mini-Intensive 2021) is an educator, cartographer, and artist based in Santa Cruz, California. She currently works as a teaching artist with The Moth and facilitates storytelling workshops with young people and community groups. Ciera also organizes with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a collective of activists, critical cartographers, and oral historians documenting dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes.

Claire Anderson (Shaking the Family Tree 2024) is a perpetual student with a focus on collective memory in post-conflict communities and the roles that family memories play in both perpetuating and resolving conflict. She is currently in a period of professional transition and is spending much of her free time exploring her own family tree.

Claire Cororaton (October Mini Intensive 2021) is a PhD history student in history at Cornell University. She is originally from Manila, Philippines but has lived in the United States for the past 15 years. She is interested in the intellectual and political history of ideas of development in postcolonial and decolonizing states. Her current research focuses on the history of agricultural development and the emergence of state capitalism in the Philippines during the US colonial period (1898 – 1941).

Clark Wieman (October Intensive 2022): Real estate professional, for 30+ years, focusing on urban issues, with variety of avocations including hiking, biking, photography, sundry outdoor activities. Large extended family, quite quiet small inner circle.

Cori Olinghouse (Shaking the Family Tree 2024) is an artist, archivist and curator working with performance and time-based media. In 2017 she founded The Portal, an artist-led initiative that cultivates archiving as a poetic and performative practice. Recently, she collaborated with video artist Charles Atlas on a moving-image installation for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, 2018–19. In 2019 she collaborated with the Studio Museum in Harlem on the acquisition and restaging of Autumn Knight’s performance work WALL, 2014–16. Cori holds an MA in performance curation from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University, and serves as visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Corinne Botz (OHSS Intensive 2019) Corinne May Botz is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator whose work engages with themes including space, gender, trauma and the body. Her published books combining photography and writing include The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Monacelli Press, 2004) and Haunted Houses (Monacelli Press, 2010). Botz’s photographs have been internationally exhibited at such institutions as the Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography; De Appel; Turner Contemporary; Bellwether Gallery; and Benrubi Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foam Magazine, Hyperallergic, Bookforum, and Time: Lightbox. She has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Atlantic Center for the Arts; Akademie Schloss Solitude; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Mana Contemporary. Botz is the recipient of both the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation grants. Botz is represented by Benrubi Gallery in NYC.

Cornélia Strickler (Archive 2013) As the Video Archivist for the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, Cornelia Strickler ensures the preservation, the archiving and the documentation of the Centre’s Oral History collection. She also creates video clips for temporary exhibits, pedagogical and promotional materials. Ms. Strickler has a Master’s Degree in Promotion of Cultural Heritage.

Cory Fischer-Hoffman (OHSS Intensive 2014) is an activist-scholar and media maker. She is the founder of the Prison Voices Project, a radio-story telling program that addresses various aspects of the prison system by highlighting the voices of those most impacted. The Prison Voices Project airs on WGXC 90.7FM in Greene and Columbia counties. Cory is also a doctoral student in Latin American, Caribbean and US Latino Studies at the University of Albany, SUNY. Her dissertation research focuses on media representations of the prison crisis in Venezuela and the relationship between contemporary prison uprisings and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Cory is also a trained facilitator, a yoga instructor and gardener.

Craig Barber: (October Mini Intensive 2021) I am NW based fine art photographer documenting farmers and their work growing OUR food. My intent is to educate folks about where their food comes from and what immigrants contribute to the process.

Cyns Nelson (OHSS “Talking White” 2022) coordinates Boulder Public Library’s Maria Rogers Oral History Program and is the author of "Oral History in Your Library: Create Shelf Space for Community Voice." Cyns is a professional librarian with 12 years leading, consulting on, and contributing to oral-history projects throughout Colorado. She has been a guest lecturer for San Jose State University and has taught regional and national oral history workshops, including for the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress. Cyns is passionate about the mission of libraries and the work of individual librarians; she views oral history as a strategic opportunity for librarians to facilitate conversation and create knowledge in their communities.

Cynthia Stone (OHSS Intensive 2013), Associate Professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester Massachusetts, has been Director of Latin American and Latino Studies for the past six years. Her limited experience with oral history fieldwork to date includes supervising students conducting honors theses and community-based learning projects, as well as research into early sixteenth-century Mexican manuscripts based on indigenous oral testimonies. Along with her colleague, Rosa Carrasquillo, she is hoping to jump-start an interdisciplinary project documenting the history of the Spanish-speaking population in Worcester, which has grown exponentially over the past few decades.

Damon Freeman (Shaking the Family Tree 2017, April Mini-Intensive 2021): I grew up in the Washington, DC area and currently work as a professor at the University of Maryland University College where I chair the History and African American Studies program. UMUC is a very large online university with some hybrid classes; most of our students are in the military or are returning students who never completed a college degree. My typical week involves staffing classes, interviewing, hiring, evaluating, and sometimes training new faculty members, making curriculum decisions and developing new curricula, resolving student concerns, and working with other university departments on multiple issues. Part of the reason why I am taking this workshop is I want to create a doable oral history project in my program that would work in either an online or hybrid class for adult students. When I have spare time, I like to go hiking, visit museums and art galleries, and volunteer on historic preservation projects.

Daniel Cogan, NP (Guest Instructor, OHSS Intensive 2018) is a palliative care nurse practitioner with Aspire Health, the nation’s largest provider of non-hospice community-based palliative care. He is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Nursing, and has advanced certification in geriatrics as well as hospice and palliative care. He holds a Certificate in Bioethics and Medical Humanities from the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics.

Danielle Choi (October Mini Intensive 2021) is a landscape architect and design historian. Her work concerns landscape at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture. She currently teaches studio and research seminars at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Prior to her academic appointment, Choi practiced in New York City and Berlin.

Danielle Dulken (OHSS Intensive 2017, Production Coordinator) is a reproductive justice activist from the mountains of western North Carolina. A doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill and field scholar at the Southern Oral History Program, Danielle is interested in practices of wellness as resistance in southern Appalachia. Her research borrows from critical race studies to challenge dominant narratives that foreclose on the region’s diversity and modernity. Her methods center the queering of temporality – or a rethinking of linearity in oral history narratives. Danielle is also excited about experimental research projects with outcomes in sound art and performance. She is a former Columbia Oral History Summer Institute Fellow and holds an M.A. in History from American University. While earning her M.A., Danielle collaborated with grassroots, pro-choice activists to create the Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force Oral History Project (WACDTF OHP). She currently lives in Chapel Hill with her partner and two cats and serves on the Board of Directors at the Carolina Abortion Fund.

Danielle Riou (Radio 2013): I work at Bard, at the Human Rights Project. Briefly, I’ve worked on media projects involving genocide and crimes against humanity, and I’m currently developing a radio show called Human Rights Radio. Back in 2002, I managed what was then the first public, on-demand streaming video archive of a genocide trial (Slobodan Milosevic’s trial, to be exact) , over the course of which I’ve put considerable time into thinking about and presenting work on issues of trauma, witnessing, memory, and the construction of conflict and post-conflict narratives. The human rights radio show I’m developing now, which will deal with a range of issues and topics in the human rights field, and so this seems like the perfect moment for me to learn more about and reflect on oral histories for radio, since I can imagine the potential for this to become a vital part of the radio work I’ll be doing.

Dao Tran (Radio 2013): Born in Vietnam, Dao is the youngest of eight children in a family of refugees who came to the United States in 1975. In her youth, Dao organized with Asian Americans United in Philadelphia to build campaigns for youth and community empowerment, against racial violence, and for tenants’ rights. Dao coedited 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History and is working on a domestic worker oral history project. She is a board member of Voices of a People’s History. She also has a kindergartner in a New York City public school and is involved with activist groups including Change the Stakes.

Darlene Stokes (OHSS Intensive 2019) Darlene recently retired from New York City's Department of Education. For over thirty-five years she has served as an educator in various capacities, classroom teacher for early childhood, elementary and adult education, a professional staff developer for teachers and school administrators alike and as a school administrator in the positions of assistant principal and principal. She is an avid reader on a broad spectrum of topics. Darlene facilitates book discussions on professional and nonprofessional levels. Currently she is exploring the topics of grief, the role and power of agency and podcasting. Since retirement Darlene has actively pursued her interest in documenting family histories for the average person. She use family photos as an initial talking point to unearth the past and how to re-imagine ones present and future existence. She has a Bachelor of Science in Education from Adelphi University, a Master of Arts in Instructional Technology and Media from Teachers College Columbia University and a Master of Science in Education from The City College. Darlene resides in White Plains, New York.

Darrell Cannon (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is an activist, inspirational speaker, leader in the movement for reparations for the Chicago Police Torture survivors, and advisory board member of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials. Darrell was tortured on November 2, 1983 by white detectives working under the supervision of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge. After being electrically shocked on his genitals with a cattle prod, subjected to mock execution with a shotgun, hung by his handcuffs and tormented with racist slurs and epithets, he confessed to being an accomplice to a murder. The confession led to his wrongful conviction for murder and twenty-four years of incarceration, ten of which he spent in Tamms Correctional Center, a super-max prison that he worked with scores of others to close in 2013. He has testified before Chicago’s City Council in support of the reparations ordinance. He also has spoken to countless numbers of people, in small, intimate audiences to wide lectures halls, at high schools, universities, churches including Operation Rainbow Push, as well as national gatherings convened by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Darrell has appeared on numerous television shows including Democracy Now and Al Jazeera, and his work and story have been covered in multiple print media outlets including Mother Jones and the Chicago Reader, and he has been quoted at length in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, Chicago Reporter, DNAinfo, Final Call and other news outlets.

Daryl Waters (November Mini Intensive 2023) is the newly hired Program Associate for The Visiting Room Project (TVRP). Daryl also contributed his story to TVRP and is an ambassador for the project, sharing his lived experience with public audiences nationally. Daryl came home last year after more than 29 years in Angola. As someone who has always been passionate about education, he worked as an Education Supervisor, supervising a team of tutors helping other incarcerated brothers get their high school diplomas. He also pioneered a re-entry program and managed the largest club at Angola. In addition to these duties and many more, Daryl served as an Associate Pastor of Angola’s largest congregation, where he regularly counseled, taught and preached. Even on the outside, Daryl continues ministering as an Associate Pastor at Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church in Gibson, Louisiana and mentoring youth in his community.

David Petrovsky (OHSS Intensive 2012): I’m a native New Yorker that has been involved in the Antiques business for the past thirty years. I began as a private dealer specializing in 19th century American furniture then opening a retail space in Hudson from 1995-2001 after closing the store I worked at Stair Galleries in Hudson for three years. I am now back to private dealing working with museums collectors along with some wholesale trade. I look forward to producing and directing an independent documentary film and am interested in the skills needed for the interview process.

Dawn Breeze (Shaking the Family Tree 2017) is an interdisciplinary artist living in Germantown, New York. She explores her guiding questions in non-linear ways, moving freely between artistic disciplines such as teaching, writing, visual and conceptual art, social practice and parenting. Breeze recently founded and directs Instar Lodge in Germantown, NY. Instar Lodge is a creative mixed-use art space, in what was formerly an Odd Fellows Hall, with a focus towards supporting women artists in a myriad of ways. Breeze leads the progressive arts program at the Liberi School k-8 school in Hudson NY and teaches her Creativity + Courage™ adult workshops throughout New England. Creativity + Courage™ is an aesthetic arts process program Breeze developed, which is applicable to all people in pursuit of discovering and developing their unique creative voice. Breeze has successfully been leading her workshops for individuals and institutions such as Highwatch Recovery Center as well as corporations such as Etsy since 2011.

David Barnes (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) is Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He has written two books on the ways in which political, social, and cultural change reshaped perceptions of the urban environment, infectious disease, and public health in nineteenth-Century France. Barnes is currently writing a history of the Lazaretto quarantine station (1799-1895) on the Delaware River outside Philadelphia, and is actively involved in the preservation of the Lazaretto site. In recent years, he has also taught and written about strategies for presenting history to the public, and about the ways in which historical perspectives can change the way we confront health and illness today. His Lazaretto research gave rise to a new project on the factors that shape the health of immigrant communities in the U.S., from the birth of the nation to the present day.

Dawn DiPrince (Mixed/Memory 2015) is the director of a state-owned community history museum. They have been the director for just over a year, and is in the midst of a successful transformation into a museum that engages in participatory history and honors people's personal histories. They are working on several memory projects in different local neighborhoods that are in crisis and have long-time residents, and aim to interpret these histories within the museum gallery space and within the neighborhood. They are also establishing a prototype gallery where we experiment with different methods to get people to share their histories within the museum.

Deb Bilodeau (DB) (November Mini Intensive 2023), they/them: I'm an writer, artist, and ex-winemaker living in San Francisco. I'm interested in labor, queerness, science fiction, gardening, and resistance.

Debbie Blicher (she/her) (November Mini Intensive 2023, Oral History Intensive 2024) is a freelance audio producer with a background in writing, software, and speech science. Her first gig had her asking scientists how they used signal processing software, and she discovered that she loves to shut up and listen. She's interested in the oral history of Jewish communities and of areas experiencing severe effects of climate change. She writes essays to hear herself think, goes birding to hear ecosystems think, and swims to give her ears a break.

Debbie Galant (I Am Sitting In A Room 2017) is the co-creator of The Chemo Files, an award-winning podcast about her year as a breast cancer patient, and is currently producing a podcast called Stuff Dot Life, about our relationship with things. Many years ago -- when sound was stored on magnetic tape and edited with razor blades -- she produced an oral-history documentary about her grandfather, Abraham, Our Father, which detailed his journey from Russia and his family's transformation into Americans. Debbie is a longtime journalist, diarist, and entrepreneur, and has three published novels. She loves the intimacy of the recorded voice, and seeks new collaborators and projects.

Deborah Kutenplon (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) (she/her): I am a nurse midwife, teaching undergraduate maternity nursing and Health & Cultural Diversity at Rhode Island College. My deepest interest is in supporting students from traditionally marginalized communities to graduate from college, both for their own sakes and to diversify the healthcare workforce. A sense of belonging, connectedness, and being seen as whole people have been well documented as important factors in students’ success in college. I have become interested in interviewing and oral histories as a way to promote a sense of inclusion for diverse students. I also wonder if it could be a tool to promote faculty’s understanding of the reality of students’ lives and therefore their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion work and to supporting students facing academic and life challenges. I’m particularly looking forward to learning empowering interviewing techniques.

Debra Gitterman (OHWS Radio 2015) is a writer, artist, web developer and classics scholar who has been living in the Hudson Valley since 2008. She is compelled by the political, personal, and social power of storytelling and driven to learn its craft. She’s ready to shape and share some stories.

Denia Pérez Noriega (Shaking the Family Tree 2024): I am a DACAmented non-profit immigration lawyer by trade, but consider myself to be a storyteller. While my storytelling has taken shape through my legal writing and advocacy, I’m eager to pivot and go back to my creative beginnings. As I contemplate a life outside of the U.S. due to the legal uncertainty around DACA, it feels necessary to document the desires and fears my parents and grandparents had when they left Mexico, and the lessons learned. Using my experience as an advocate and researcher, I want to dig deeper into my family’s migration story and conduct an oral history that will eventually provide the content for a book. In the immediate, I imagine that my interviews with family will add color to the stories about migration currently circulating in the mainstream.

Desiree Evans (OHSS Intensive 2015) has a diverse background as a researcher, writer, journalist, and social justice activist. During the past fifteen years, she has had the opportunity to work with several international and domestic human rights organizations. As a journalist she has covered issues of race, poverty, and economic justice for such publications as Alternet, The Chicago Reporter, In These Times, The Indianapolis Star, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, and others. In 2014, she helped to launch the Social Movements Oral History Tour, which allowed her to travel the U.S. collecting oral histories and stories from progressive social movement activists and organizers. A Louisiana native, Desiree currently lives in New Orleans, where she is the the Policy and Communications Director for Women With a Vision, Inc. She has a B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University and a M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University.

Destry Maria Sibley (November Mini Intensive 2023) is a writer, producer, and educator. A doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, she studies feminist and queer nonfiction life writing. She also produces radio and podcasts, teaches literature courses at the City College of New York, and spends most of her time raising her two young children.

Dhana Hamal (OHSS Intensive 2018) completed her B. A. in Human Rights and Politics at Bard College and her MA in Political Science at the University of Toronto. She has worked extensively on a research project in ‘human trafficking vulnerability’ in Nepal conducted by Vanderbilt and Stanford universities. Her interests include migration, labor and health policy, democracy and security, gender inequality, and multicultural politics.

Diana Duque (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) I was born in NYC and spent eight formative years living in Colombia, SA with my family before returning to complete my undergraduate degree in NY. I am a communications designer, researcher, and recent MA Design Studies graduate at the School of Art & Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design, The New School. My academic research focuses on memory, semiotics and visual culture. My interests lie at the intersection of design, history, theory, criticism and pedagogy. My most recent work explores themes of memory and cultural production in Colombia, South America.

Diana Lempel (OHSS Intensive 2013, Radio 2013, Project Lab 2014) loves stories. Everyday stories, old, old stories, and big stories that everyone knows. She especially loves stories about landscapes, or places that shape and are shaped by people. A PhD student at Harvard, Diana believes in stories as a way to help people live more meaningful, rooted lives. She also believes in the places where stories are told: museums and libraries, and the dinner table, and campfires. You can read and listen to some of her work at cultivatingplaces.com.

Diane Harriford (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023, Project Design Lab 2024): I am a sociologist and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Vassar College and former director of the Women's Studies Program. I teach Black Intellectual History, Stratification, Modern Social Theory and Introduction to Sociology. All of the courses are designed to challenge white supremacy.

Din Clarke (Radio 2014) is a filmmaker, multimedia journalist, videographer, editor and seamstress. She received a B.A. in Media Studies from The New School and an M.A. from New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism. Her videos have appeared in The Guardian and the New York Times and her audio pieces have aired on WBEZ in Chicago and WBAI in New York. The first short documentary film she produced and edited, The Invisibles, was selected for the 2013 Cannes Film Festival Court Métrage and she’s currently expanding it into a full-length documentary. She lives in Brooklyn with her huge grey tabby, Siddhartha - a great companion but the worst administrative assistant ever.

Dina Gregory Nowicki (OHSS Intensive 2016) is an educator, activist, aspiring writer, community weaver, and a joyful play and life enthusiast. She is currently working as an ENL teacher at Ichabod Crane Central School district in Valatie, NY. Though English as a Second Language and Spanish are her certification area, the truth is that she doesn’t really care about grammar. Her job is a cover for teaching about the human heart, fostering connections, and inspiring her students to lead lives of joyful service. Dina is currently working with the Social Harmony Institute to develop programming that systematically provides school communities with a functional toolkit for promoting social and emotional well-being and skills necessary to move conflicts that naturally arise in all relationships towards growth and understanding. Dina is a lifelong learner who is constantly exploring her own inner and outer landscape and is dedicated to living a deeply conscious, passionate, and creative life based on the pursuit of Truth, growth, and social justice. She lives at the Quaker Intentional Community in East Chatham, NY where she and others explore conscious culture creation in community. Dina joined the OHSS in order to explore how storytelling can be used as a tool to rewrite the current narrative on the role and purpose of public education.

Dominique Thomas (April Mini-Intensive 2021) is a grassroots organizer, researcher, Afrofuturist Black feminist nerd based in Harlem, New York, who believes relationships are essential to successful base-building and being strategic requires organizing from the intersections of climate and other systems of oppression. She launched The Climate League in 2020, a BIPOC training program to learn organizing and campaigning skills, focusing on racial justice in the climate movement. Her main objective in this work is to uplift the labor and stories of those who have been erased from the climate movement, while creating avenues for engagement utilizing an organizing orientation where communities can empower themselves. She currently serves as the Training Manager at the Climate Advocacy Lab, where she uses evidence-based advocacy to train organizer to build power and scale the climate movement.

Donna Alvah (OHSS Intensive 2021): I'm an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University in Northern New York. As a researcher, I'm interested in social and cultural aspects of foreign relations, especially the Cold War--e.g., how ordinary people, not just government officials, perceive and respond to foreign relations. My current projects focus on children and youth in the Cold War at any point, and in any geographical location.

Doris Duanmu (November Mini Intensive 2023) (she/her/hers) is a designer, researcher, and educator. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at Boston Architectural College while practicing and researching as a design strategist. Her research incorporates individual narratives to interrogate architecture’s role in justifying socially, culturally, and politically constructed collective memory and urban agendas. Doris graduated with a master’s of science in architectural studies and urbanism from MIT.

Dory Klein (OHSS “Talking White” 2022): I am the Community History and Digitization Specialist at the Boston Public Library. This position is funded by a grant supporting the Boston Research Center, a community history and digital archives lab based at Northeastern University Library in partnership with the BPL. In this role, I work with organizational partners and individuals to co-design and develop projects that bring Boston’s deep neighborhood and community histories to light. I do not believe that libraries and archives are neutral spaces; by choosing what stories to preserve, how we describe them, and how we make them accessible, we can either reinforce or challenge existing inequities. I am committed to challenging oppressive power structures in research institutions; as such, I work to preserve and support the histories of communities traditionally marginalized in these spaces, in their own voices and on their own terms. Previously, I was the librarian and archivist at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Virginia, and served as the map librarian at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL. I hold an MA in History and an MLIS with a concentration in Archives Management.

Dr Mark McKirdy (Radio 2013): I have a doctorate in Creative Arts from Wollongong University and I currently work as a Children’s Librarian. I have published several books, magazine stories, poetry and travel articles – many based on places in the USA. My experience in oral history is through assisting my wife, Carol, who has also applied for this Summer School. We have established an oral history business called History Herstory - RECALL RECORD RETAIN. The web address is: www.historyherstory.com.au My major involvement with oral history recordings is turning them into digital stories and books which enscapulte the recording accompanied by images.

Dre Jácome (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is a brown queer re-indigenizing designer, herbalist, communications and cultural organizer dedicated to craft of stewarding technology and land for the people. Previously she has served as codirector of Girls Rock Philly and the communications director at NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives as well as an herbal educator and grower in NYC. As a current MS candidate at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, her practice is deeply informed by our oldest technology, the land. Through interactive design, she aims to build magical realist experiences that move people through the past and future in ways to inspire and honor Black and Brown ancestors and descendants. She is the child of Colombian and Ecuadorian immigrants.

DW Gibson (Guest Instructor, Oral History and Writing 2017) is the author of the awarding-winning book The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century and Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy. He shared a National Magazine Award for his work on “This Is the Story of One Block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn” for New York Magazine. His work has also appeared in Harper’s,The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and The Caravan. Gibson has been a contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered and “There Goes the Neighborhood,” a podcast co-produced by WNYC and The Nation. His documentary film, Not Working, a companion to the book, is available through Films Media Group. His directorial debut, Pants Down, premiered at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Gibson serves as director of Writers Omi at Ledig House in Ghent, New York, and he co-founded Sangam House, a writers’ residency in India, along with Arshia Sattar.

Elinor Renfield (OHSS Intensive 2021): I was born and bred in Manhattan. My parents were educators and professionals in their fields which were Bio Chemistry and Psychology. I was a public school student with the advantages of many programs in Theatre and Dance at the famed 92nd St. Y, where in the 50's Martha Graham's company was in residence, and Dylan Thomas was supervising readings of ""Under Milkwood"". I went to the High School of Performing Arts, studying drama and modern dance, and in my junior year at Emerson College I spent a year studying in London at The Royal Central School for Speech and Drama. It was in London that I understood that I was more interested in analysis and interpretation of text than performance, and I began to prepare for a career in teaching. Simultaneously, while first teaching at Hunter College HighSchool, Brooklyn College, and my own studio classes, I was pursuing a career as a director. From age 28 through age 60 I worked at outstanding Theatre Companies, and won several awards. I Had a child at 40, and began teaching at Princeton University in the Program in Theatre and Dance where I stayed for 20 years when my son was ready to leave home. Since 1999 I have been teaching in the Theatre Program at The New School, first in the MFA graduate program where I was Chair for 5 years, and then the new BFA undergraduate program where I am still teaching, and still looking to integrate history and politics into the curriculum.

Edward Morris (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) works with Susannah Sayler as the artist duo Sayler/Morris. Sayler/Morris work with a variety of media and often in collaboration with others to expand and transform our ideas about ecology. What is ecological thinking? What is an ecological society? They are also concerned with the way that cultural production contributes to social movements, particularly the climate justice movement. In 2006, Sayler/Morris co-founded The Canary Project—a studio that produces visual media and artworks that deepen public understanding of climate change and other ecological issues. They have been awarded the David Brower Center’s Art / Act Award (2016), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2014) and the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (2009). Their work has been exhibited broadly in the United States and internationally at art museums, public spaces and interdisciplinary institutions such as science museums, history museums and anthropology museums. They are currently teaching in the Transmedia Department at Syracuse University. Their archives are collected by the Nevada Museum of Art / Reno, Center for Art and Environment. In 2020, they are launching are new long-term project in Hudson, New York called Toolshed. Toolshed gathers and shares tools for an equitable, livable future.

Elana Gordon (December Mini Intensive 2021) is a journalist and audio producer covering global health for The World, a national radio program from PRX and GBH. In that role, she also moderates a regular online forum and podcast about the pandemic in partnership with Harvard’s T.H. Chan school of Public health. Prior to The World, Elana was a health reporter for KCUR in Kansas City and then WHYY in Philadelphia. She is a founding member of The Pulse, a weekly health and science show from WHYY. Her work has been featured on NPR and Kaiser Health News as well as the podcasts “99% Invisible,” Criminal and Undark. Elana’s beat reporting, use of sound, and audio documentaries have received multiple Regional Edward R. Murrow and national Public Media Journalists Association awards. She was a 2019 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. She’s based in Philadelphia.

Eli Plenk (OHSS Intensive 2015) is a teacher, writer, and organizer based in Brooklyn. He teaches English in the New York state prison system and is the founding editor of a transnational human rights journal that will begin publication this fall. When not writing or teaching he organizes with a variety of groups, including the New York Reentry Education Network and Boston Mobilization.

Elinor Rush (Oral History for Educators 2019) I am 66 years old. I live in a rural setting in a log house which I rebuilt with help. I ran my own manufacturing business for 30 years, designing and manufacturing clothing for people with special needs. I am a fibre artist producing work for exhibition and more recently trained as a teacher of sewing and resilience in the elementary school system. I sit on 2 boards, one a community house of 35 years standing. One of the histories I would like to record is the history of the Kingston Community House for self Reliance. Looking forward to meeting everyone!

Elisa Gutierrez (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) (she/her) is a huge fan of audio and the power of an oral history. She has spent the past four years as a podcast producer. Elisa's worked on a range of shows covering a wide swath of topics: from exploring the allure of conspiracies to hearing first hand how the pandemic has changed the lives of funeral home directors and sex workers. She's currently an audio producer at the New York Times and lives in Brooklyn.

Elisabeth Workman (October Intensive 2022) is a writer and poet with a background in dance. Originally from the pharmaceutical suburbs of Philadelphia, she has since lived in Boston, rural Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, the Standing Rock Nation of the Dakotas, Qatar, and now Minneapolis. She’s collaborated on numerous projects with visual artists and other poets; her work has appeared in The End of the World Project (Moria Books), Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene (Wesleyan), Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (Edge Books), on a lit-up traffic sign in a construction zone in downtown Minneapolis (Northern Lights), and in a Codex of Quotidian Beasts (with Jenny Schmid’s cryptozoological etchings). She is the author of a dozen chapbooks—including the recently released THE FIGURES: A LITTER (Dancing Girl Press 2021)—and the poetry collections ULTRAMEGAPRAIRIELAND (Bloof Books 2014) and ENDLESSNESS IS NO DESOLATION (Dusie Press 2016). She teaches creative writing and poetry at Minneapolis College of Art & Design.

Eliza Newland (OHSS Intensive 2014) -I am a recent graduate of the Public History MA program at West Virginia University and am currently serving as a PreserveWV AmeriCorps at the Old Hemlock Foundation in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. The Old Hemlock Foundation just started an oral history project. Through the interdisciplinary nature of OHSS, I would like to build on my preexisting oral history knowledge and skills to better serve my AmeriCorps site. I also have hopes of starting an oral history project of my own once my service is completed in September.

Elizabeth LoGiudice (I Am Sitting In A Room 2017) is an environmental educator who has been helping people explore and understand the landscape and waterways of the Hudson River region for over 15 years. Her work ranges from providing hands-on field experiences, to leading educational programs on flooding and climate change, to producing radio programs on environmental topics. She is interested in the use of oral history and storytelling to help make complex, scientific information more engaging to audiences. Liz has conducted interviews with local residents on a variety of environmental and historical topics for the production of radio programs on WGXC, 90.7 FM in Greene and Columbia Counties. She is interested in blending natural sound, music, narrative and science to produce audio broadcasts that illuminate environmental issues. Her current effort, which is a capstone project to complete an M.S. in Environmental Communications from Green Mountain College, involves recounting stories of the fascinating, migratory fish of the Hudson River. Liz holds a B.A. in History from SUNY Albany, and runs a small farm in Hannacroix, NY. elizabeth.logiudice@greenmtn.edu

Elizabeth Oliver (OHSS “Talking White” 2022): I am a writer, editor, and educator based in Beacon, NY. I earned my MA from the New School for Social Research, where I focused on writing an ethnographic study of a superfund site in Brooklyn. My BA is in English and History from the University of Minnesota. I spent years teaching English language in rural Thailand and literature in Yangon, Myanmar, followed by nearly a decade as an educator at a public high school in NYC where I won a United Federation of Teachers' Educator of the Year Award in 2018. I currently work for a nonprofit medical research foundation, and serve as a writer, coach, and editor for Voices of Lefferts, a community writing and history project based in Flatbush. Most recently, I have stepped in as Acting Director of the Voices of Lefferts Oral History project.

Elizabeth Shaw (OHSS Intensive 2018) is an elementary educator teaching library, coding, and mythology to kids in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She also serves on the board of Resolve Network, a grassroots peacebuilding organization currently working in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is in the process of planning an oral history collection project at her place of work, Rodeph Sholom School and working with Resolve to document participants' stories. Her areas of interest are antiracist education, public health, community and family histories and conflict resolution. She was born in the District of Columbia, went to school outside Philadelphia, PA, and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY; her hobbies include genealogy, embroidery, translation, and other activities in the spinster tradition.

Ellen Harris (October Intensive 2022, Project Design Lab 2024) is a former attorney who lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC. While that is not at all interesting, Ellen is not the same as every other person who could have written that sentence. For example, she used to work with raw materials compounding fragrances in a grungy Long Island City NY lab, and she always got a seat on the subway on the way home because those materials could be pretty stinky. She is also a big fan of Americana music and has a great Johnny Cash t-shirt collection. She loves listening to stories of all sorts, live or recorded, and she recently got the courage to tell some of her own stories on stage at a couple of Moth Story Slams and one Grand Slam. She has three 20-something-year-old kids, a husband and a dog named Clint.

Ellen Papazian (Trauma 2013, Doc Film 2013): I’m a writer, editor and creative writing teacher. My nonfiction and fiction appear in a few anthologies, and my essays, interviews and book reviews appear in Bitch magazine. I lead creative writing workshops in studio settings and school-based residencies in northern New Jersey.

Ellen Silverman (Project Design Lab 2024) is a New York City based photographer and filmmaker who for over 25 years has specialized in food, interior and travel photography. She has photographed over 30 cookbooks and has worked with a variety of editorial, advertising and publishing clients. In May of 2015 she received her MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from The School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Emma Colón (Fall Mini Intensive 2019)I'm an artist and cultural worker committed to supporting art's capacity to build community and effect social change. I'm currently the Media & Storytelling Manager at The Laundromat Project and was previously Editorial & Communications Manager at A Blade of Grass. My favorite writers right now are Jia Tolentino, Jenna Wortham, and Kiese Laymon.

Emily Bass (OHSS Intensive 2018): I'm a writer, queer, social justice and HIV-focused activist, mother and NGO-employed worker in the ongoing African AIDS epidemic. I'm 12 months away from the submission deadline for my first book, The Plague War, a history of America's war on AIDS in Africa as fought through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). My writing has appeared in n+1, the Lancet, Esquire and many other publications, and has received notable mention in Best American Essays.

Emily Dawson (October Mini Intensive 2021) is a current PhD Candidate in Education at the University of Melbourne and works as a Senior Policy Officer at the peak state-based Aboriginal Community-Controlled Organisation for education, the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association Inc. She holds a Master’s degree in Teaching, specialising in Indigenous Perspectives on Professional Practice, and has been selected as a 2021 International Specialised Skills (ISS) Institute George Alexander Foundation Fellow. Emily’s research and fellowship hopes to contribute to teacher training, educational policy and curriculum development at a critical political turning point in Aboriginal self-determination in education reform. Her research hopes to provide a “history of the present” by undertaking a complex and comparative reading of text-based and documentary archives, as well as oral histories. Emily believes oral histories hold the key to highlighting the advocacy, agency and self-determining actions of Aboriginal students, families, communities, teachers and authorities within colonial systems of education, and are essential to decolonising history.

Emily Deppermann (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) (she/her): I graduated from Illinois State University with a BS in Public Relations in December 2020. After working in social media for several months, I decided to return to ISU to pursue my Masters degree in Communication. I am also a communication graduate assistant in the Office of Alumni Engagement, where I manage our social media account and interview and write stories about our notable alumni for the University.

Emily Gallagher (OHSS Intensive 2013): I currently work at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, both as an Educator and recently as the Community Outreach Coordinator, as which I’m working to find oral history candidates for a future exhibit about Chinese and Latino immigration. I am very interested in social history. I find human geography fascinating, especially how in New York City, there is a tension between government, development and city planning and the communities that live here and want to sustain their neighborhoods. For fun, I have worked to create public pop-up museums in different New York City neighborhoods to tell forgotten histories— including the shipbuilders in Greenpoint, Brooklyn during the Civil War, the free black and immigrant community of Seneca Village in what is now Central Park, and an East Village tour that had to do with community perception, personal memory, and collective memory. I have also worked as an educator at a variety of other historic sites, like the Wyckoff Farmhouse, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the new Navy Yard Museum. Currently I also work at the NY Historical Society. I love story telling and inspiring visitors to feel a connection with people from the past, and to better understand their position in the present through the context history can provide. In my free time I am the co-chair of a community activist group, Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, in my Brooklyn neighborhood. We attempt to empower and educate neighborhood residents around issues of government, social and environmental justice. I spend my leisure time watching movies, especially documentaries, reading poetry, and writing.

Emily Marielle Mitamura (OHSS Intensive 2014) is a rising junior at Vassar College, majoring in political science with correlate sequences in Jewish studies and English, specifically poetry. She’s currently employed as a consultant at the Vassar College Writing Center and has plans to study abroad at Charles University in Prague next year. Her experiences observing the workings of disparate fields as a research assistant at the New York Botanical Garden Pfizer Research Laboratory, a volunteer at the Jaguar Research Conservation Fund, and an editorial intern at Fitness Magazine have imbued her with a penchant for chance encounters and storytelling.

Emily Truitt (Oral History & Writing 2019) I am a mother and amateur writer, artist and crafter. I like writing about my experiences with other people and sharing them so that we can all understand each other a little better. I have long-term interests in trauma psychology and societal transitions and I want to pursue those interests in a creative way. My current job is transcribing and annotating the speech of young children. I have a huge garden, I do a lot of home improvement projects, and I'm learning French. I live on a beautiful piece of land in far northern New York State and I spend a lot of time trying to understand how best to steward that land.

Emma de Campo (OHSS Intensive 2013) is an Independent Radio Producer from Melbourne, Australia. She produces podcasts for businesses and not-for-profits, hosts two programs on Community Radio Station 3CR, and provides sound editing training to radio producers.Emma trained in radio at the radio documentary school Transom, since her work has been featured on Radio National, Triple R, ABC Pool and US Radio Stations WCAI & WAMC.

Emma Rose Brown (OHSS Intensive 2017, Archives Coordinator, CLOVS Co-Director) (b. 1991) is a Queens-based performer, multidisciplinary artist, and oral historian working in the field of dance. She assists in the production of the Dance Oral History Project at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and is the Archives Director of the Community Library of Voice and Sound. Emma is a three time SU CASA artist-in-residence through Queens Council on the Arts where she's taught experimental documentary arts to older adults. Emma has presented work at DOC NYC, Atlantic Center for the Arts, GIBNEY, Movement Research, New York Live Arts, and The School of Making Thinking. Most recently she performed in Mina Nishimura’s work Mapping the forest in search of the opposite term for exorcist at Danspace Project. Emma is an MFA candidate in Integrated Media Art at Hunter College.

Enrique Rivera (he/him) (Oral History Intensive 2024) is a filmmaker and cultural worker from the Puerto Rican diaspora. His creative endeavors are anchored in documentary and multimedia projects that amplify narratives of BIPOC, LGBTQI+, and marginalized communities. Through investigative reporting, creative expression, and archival research, he strives to share stories marked by authenticity and inclusivity. Expanding the boundaries of his craft, Enrique is committed to prioritizing archival preservation while also venturing beyond conventional mediums such as video and photo. This includes cultural artifacts such as family trees, music, recipes, dance, connections with nature, and ancestral wisdom. He aspires to collectively redefine non-fiction storytelling by integrating multidisciplinary methodologies, including decolonized storytelling, abolitionist frameworks, queer history, liberation psychology, sustainable agriculture, oral history, and other disciplines that enrich our understanding of the narratives we weave. Past documentary projects have covered topics including legal institutions, belief systems, trafficking, and cultural icons. His work has been featured on HBOMax, National Geographic, CNN, and The Atlantic. Enrique was a Flaherty Film Seminar LEF Foundation Fellow for the 2023 Queer World Mending seminar, an Arts for LA 2024 Arts Advocacy Delegate, and is a member of the Documentary Producers Alliance.

Eric Lewis (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is software engineer on Google Search, where he works on some oral history projects. He lives in Brooklyn, and holds a B.A. in Individualized Study from New York University.

Erica O’Neil, PhD, (OHSS Intensive 2018) is a trained anthropologist, historian, and biologist with experience cultivating ethical cultures across academic projects that teach public science communication and outreach. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University. Her research on the emergence of disease states and regulation surrounding those entities examines the culture of scientific practice and the ethical responsibilities researchers have in the creation of products that impact public policy. She leads Reproductive Health Arizona (RHAZ) , a collaborative digital project between the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics and the Center for Biology and Society. The project aims to increase Arizonan’s literacy of reproductive health and medicine (RMH) , to record Arizona’s history of that field in a sustainable and open access digital venue, and to promote civil discussion among Arizonans about the past, future, and meaning of reproductive health. Products include articles with robust historical context written for the general public, a digital map of individuals currently active in RHM, video recorded oral histories with individuals influential to the history of Arizona's RHM, and public events that encourage civil dialogue.

Erika Bullock (October Mini Intensive 2021) is a third-year PhD student in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, where she studies higher education history, curriculum change, and student belonging and voice in postsecondary education. Her current project, an oral history project, considers student activism, curriculum change, and multiculturalism in the curriculum in the 1980s. Prior to her PhD, Erika supported curriculum innovations with Georgetown University’s Designing the Futures Initiative; teaching and learning projects with Georgetown’s center for teaching and learning (CNDLS); and worked on projects considering the future of higher education with Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute for Design (the d.school).

Erik Fanin (October Intensive 2022): I'm 22 years old and originally from Berlin, Germany. However, I spent the last three years studying the Bachelor's program PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) in the Netherlands at Utrecht University. After the Summer school I will go back to Germany and continue with my Master's program in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt (Main). Especially during the lockdown time of 2020/2021 I discovered my passion for writing and interviewing people and it gave me the possibility to give people a voice to share their stories. Also my Bachelor thesis, in which I wrote about the societal participation of former Spanish 'Guestworkers' in Aachen, Germany, I used the method of oral history. In my free time I like to watch films (I'm a big Scorsese fan) and used to watch them often with friends after school. Besides that I like to play a lot of chess, read books and go running.

Erin Aili Birney (Oral History for Organizations 2021) is a documentary photographer based in Austin, Texas. She has over ten years of experience working with asylum seekers and refugees in Central Texas. She studied documentary photography and new media at the Salt Institute in Portland, Maine.

Erin Healy (OHWS Family 2015, I Am Sitting In A Room 2017): I am currently the Director of Knowledge Sharing (fancy term for consulting) at Community Solutions, a national non-profit based in NYC. In 2014, our team began designing and facilitating an approach to systems improvement, performance management, multi-sector collaboration, and neighborhood transformation, called Agile Problem Solving. We are currently working in 15 neighborhoods in NYC as well as several in upstate NY. I'd love to incorporate oral history into this work. Prior to this, I was an Improvement Advisor with Community Solutions’ 100,000 Homes Campaign, a successful national campaign to house 100,000 of the nation’s most vulnerable homeless individuals within four years. My background is in law and I’ve done a variety of policy and legislative work in the non-profit and governmental sectors. My best job ever (before my current one) was managing an independent bookstore. I am from Saratoga Springs, New York. My interest in oral history is also driven by my desire to discover and document my upstate Irish roots. I have a BA from Mount Holyoke College and a JD from the University of Washington School of Law.

Erin Schreiner (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) I am the Executive Director of the Bibliographical Society of America, a small non-profit supporting the study of books/texts as physical objects. My personal research explores the printerly labor of the women who typed, edited, and printed screenplays in Hollywood movie studios. In the coming months I hope to locate women who did this work and interview them, and look forward to learning the basics in this workshop to ensure the integrity of this aspect of my research.

Esperanza Fonseca (April Mini-Intensive 2021) is a political activist and worker organizer in California. She is a member of the transnational feminist organization AF3IRM and a contributing editor to the LGBTQ+ political magazine TwinkRev where she investigates and writes about women and imperialism. She is a recent graduate of the esteemed Women's Policy Institute, where she spearheaded and won the "Access to Safe Food Choices and Food Security Act of 2019," which created a statewide Restaurant Meals Program that vastly increases access to hot and prepared food by CalFresh recipients who are homeless, elderly, or disabled. Her current work is focused on combatting commercial sexual exploitation of working-class women, especially women of color, nationally oppressed and trans women. She has organized with labor unions, interfaith worker justice groups, and worker centers organizing restaurant and retail workers. Fonseca graduated from Whittier College, with a degree in the Whittier Scholars Program: Feminist Studies and Liberation Theology.

Evangeline M. Mitchell (October Intensive 2022) is a lawyer, author and publisher, social entrepreneur, and documentary filmmaker. She is a graduate of Prairie View A&M University (a historically Black university outside of Houston, Texas), the University of Iowa College of Law, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She recently earned her Certificate in Documentary Arts from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Her debut documentary short Becoming Black Lawyers is now on the film festival circuit and has been screened at more than 100 film festivals worldwide and at over 70 law schools across the country, and has earned 30 awards both nationally and internationally. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas, Evangeline currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two children Nyla and Michael.

Eve K Austin (OHSS Intensive 2016, Song Collecting and Composing 2023): Right now I'm primarily a caregiver for my parents who are struggling with Parkinson's and cognitive decline. I hope to return soon to my work as an oral historian, audio maker and clinical social worker. I'd like to use music in my audio work with seniors and memory challenges. I graduated from OHSS in 2016 and SALT in 2018. I'm teaching myself ukulele!

Ezra Weissman (April Mini-Intensive 2021): I'm Circle facilitator by profession and a community gatherer in my free time. I come to this work through a passion for storytelling in various forms, and am excited to learn more about the Oral History Craft. Assorted interests of mine including: Book Clubs, vegan cooking, skateboarding, stand-up comedy, and community building.

Faythe Levine (OHSS “Talking White” 2022, October Intensive 2022) is an independent researcher & consultant motivated by reimagining archives and collections through a queer feminist lens. Her creative labor intersects with curatorial projects, consulting, writing, documentary film, and happenings. She is currently working with Women's Studio Workshop on preparation for their 2024 50th anniversary exhibition and publication.

G. Anthony Svatek (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) makes films that examine humans’ relationship with natural and urban environments. Having grown up at the foot of the Austrian Alps, Anthony is deeply awed by the living world, and the way people’s understanding of nature is informed by our increasingly technological and urban lifestyles. He is based in New York City. Amongst others, his work has been shown at the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, and DOCNYC. He's received grants and support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, and is the recipient of the New Visions Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. He currently serves as a board member at The Film-Makers' Cooperative / New American Cinema Group, staffs at the Flaherty Film Seminar, produces at BBC World, and has been a devoted volunteer at the American Museum of Natural History. This summer, Anthony is a docent at the Climate Museum on New York City's Governors Island.

Gabija Kertenyte (Gabiya) (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) used oral history accounts of participants in the Third Migration from Socialist Eastern Europe to the US in order to write her undergraduate thesis in history. She loves oral history because of its ability to reveal the nuance of life as it is lived. She already knows that she wants to dye your hair.

Gabrielle Moser (April Mini-Intensive 2021) is a writer, educator and independent curator based in Toronto. A founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, she holds a PhD in art history and visual culture from York University in Toronto, Canada, where she is an Assistant Professor in Aesthetics and Art Education in the Faculty of Education.

George Katinas (Shaking the Family Tree 2017) is a resident of Kingston, a small town in Ontario Canada. He has an interest in museums and culture and recently graduated from the Museum Management and Curatorship program of Fleming College. He is currently working on starting an Oral History Project for the Greek Community of Kingston. George works as a chef and also holds degrees in Education and Classical Studies.

Genevieve Flavelle (October Mini Intensive 2021) is an independent curator and PhD student in the Art History program at Queen’s University. Her doctoral research investigates the work of contemporary visual artists who are challenging traditional forms of historical research to give voice to underrepresented, forgotten, or imagined histories. Her broader research and curatorial interests include queer theory, queer feminist art histories, contemporary art, archives, public art, porn studies, and feminist curatorial strategies.

Gin MacCallum (OHSS Intensive 2018): Gin teaches individual and community classes in restorative and slow yoga. She also leads narrative workshops, and more recently, free writing groups for difficult stories. Trained as a creative arts/movement therapist, she is now working on studies in traumatic stress, while continuing to deepen her practice and understandings of yoga. For over 20 years, she lived and worked as a performing artist. She is particularly drawn to stories about the body.

Giulia Dickmans (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is a historian and researcher based in Berlin, Germany. She is currently working at the Freie Universität Berlin where she is pursuing a Ph.D. focusing on solidarity networks during the Cold War. Her main interests lay in questioning power structure, mainstream/subaltern narratives, the construction of memories, and oral history.

Giulia Sbaffi (OHSS Intensive 2014): I’m a student, a traveller and an Italian ginger head. I was born in Rome twenty four years ago and since then I’ve maturated an abiding affection for history and its approaches. Last December I took my bachelor’s degree in History with a thesis based on oral history. I’m also a contributor to a news blog.

Greer Hamilton (OHSS Intensive 2021) is a current 2nd year PhD student at Boston University School of Social Work. Her work broadly focuses on the intersection of racial equity, community development, and community engaged research. Her current independent research focuses on understanding how racialized policies and practices have shaped how urban spaces are designed, and how people’s interaction with these racialized spaces impact their health, sense of place, and ownership of their community. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Drug Addiction, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She also serves as an adjunct instructor for the University at Buffalo School of Social Work.

Grace Radkins (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016): I am a librarian and although I originally planned to have a quiet cataloging job at a public library, I have instead (and luckily) ended up at the Studs Terkel Radio Archive. This, along with volunteering with Human Library Chicago, led to my interest in oral history. I have lived in Chicago all my life, and have always been interested in the juxtaposition of the city's blending cultures and segregated neighborhoods. In addition to my MLIS, I have a BA in art history.

Greg Gerrand (October Mini Intensive 2021) is from a rural town in the island state of Australia, Tasmania, but now works in Melbourne, the capital city of the mainland Australian state of Victoria. He is a senior librarian at the State Library of Victoria, specialising in the acquisition and management of original materials collections. Oral history recordings are among these collections, as well as unpublished manuscripts and pictures. He is the State Library's representative on the National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA) Oral History Network, and a member of Oral History Victoria.

Greg Rosenburg (Radio 2014): I have worked in and around the field of affordable housing for nearly three decades, with a particular focus on sustainable development, universal design, and community land trusts. These days, I work with an architecture firm in Boston (telecommuting from my spare bedroom in Madison, WI) focusing on energy efficiency programs. Over the years, I’ve also done community organizing, legal representation of prisoners with mental illness, protection of land for urban farming, and run a Braille translation software company. Over the past three years, I’ve been dipping my toes into oral history work, doing background research, editing, and website development for Life History Services. Over the past year, I’ve been developing a website on the history of the community land trust movement with John Emmeus Davis, which just launched this past April (www.cltroots.org). As part of our Roots of the CLT project, we are planning on conducting interviews with key figures in the CLT movement, which we would like to turn into shorter pieces that we can post on our website, for podcasting, and possibly for broadcast on Vermont Public Radio.

Greta Weber (Shaking the Family Tree 2019) I'm an independent radio producer living in Portland, Maine. After working as a magazine journalist in Washington, D.C., I came up to Maine to learn radio storytelling at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. I graduated Salt in May 2018, and I decided to stay in Portland. I now work remotely for a podcast production company based in LA. Oral history has always been an interest of mine, and I'd love to find ways to incorporate it into my radio work.

Gretta Tritch Roman (OHSS Intensive 2017) is the Digital Projects Coordinator for Experimental Humanities (EH) at Bard College. She received her B.Arch. from the University of Arkansas and holds a M.A. and a Ph.D. in Art & Architectural History from the Pennsylvania State University. At Bard she teaches courses that focus on mapping as a cultural practice, and she has offered workshops on integrating mapping exercises into courses as well as using mapping tools in research. She also leads the EH Digital History Lab, a humanities laboratory that produces local history projects with the aim to foster an exchange between the strong community of public history in the Hudson Valley and Bard College.

A native of New York City, Guy Greenberg (Mixed/Memory 2015) graduated the New School for Public Engagement this spring. As a BA student, he’s spent time studying anthropology, clinical psychology, and methods for documentation. He’s been a principle in building www.UnitedStatesofAIDS.com, a student-led digital humanities project invested in making the oral history narratives of AIDS activists accessible and heard using existing archives. Previous to returning to school, Guy served for five years as a librarian assistant, curating and cataloging the 40,000+ video collection for Port Washington Public Library. His ongoing ritual of photographing New York and the personal project of recording his family’s oral histories keep the idea of quitting his day job and surrounding himself with oral history alive in his mind.

Grier Hall (November Mini Intensive 2023) (she/her) is a Production Manager based in the Washington DC metropolitan area. She has a bachelors degree in Sociology and a master’s degree in Pedagogical Sciences: Youth at Risk. She also holds an Arts and Heritage Management certification and completed a Museum Education Practicum with the Studio Museum in Harlem. With familial ties to Florida, Grier is interested in Environmental Justice and its links to Public Health and Culture in the Gulf Coast region of the United States.

Hailey Loman (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation and performance. She is the Co-Founder and Director of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), an artist-run archive and non-circulating library in which contemporary creative processes are recorded and preserved. She founded Autonomous Oral History Group (AOHG) a cooperative that examines the ethics that operate in leadership roles. Interviews, recordings, transcriptions and ephemera are collected during the process, assembled and made accessible as an oral history collection.

Hani Omar Khalil (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) I'm an attorney, writer, and photographer currently living in Park Slope, Brooklyn. My writing has mainly consisted of short fiction and critical essays, with an emphasis on creative works in dialogue with Egypt and the broader Arab World. Though I've lived in New York City for almost twenty years, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and attended college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am drawn creatively to ideas of place and sprawl, especially as they overlap with immigration, ethnicity, and identity. I have an equally keen interest in atomization in American society and how it overlaps with these three themes as well. Though I don't have a concrete oral history project in mind as of now, I imagine the one I would develop would be anchored in those ideas outlined above.

Hannah Beal (OHSS Intensive 2017): I own a small but diverse vegetable farm in Red Hook, NY. Though I love to grow food, my objective is to expand my scope of learning and community impact through documentary audio. I am passionate about stories, radio and people. When not farming or listening to podcasts, I can usually be found cooking or eating noodles.

Hannah Milstein (Oral History Intensive 2024) a current educator, artist, and independent scholar based in San Francisco, CA. She has worked for the last seven years as a Special Education teacher and case manager serving the local community. Hannah holds a Master of Arts in History and her research primarily focuses on historical soundscapes and the intersection of gender, race, physical voice, and conceptions of power and reality. The question of who is or is not considered a reliable narrator, of the observed world or even their own experience, is one that has driven both her academic research and instructional practices over the last few years.

Hannah Quaintance (Oral History Intensive 2024) is an anthropologist and textile artist. In all of her work, she is interested in the ways that the past is drawn into the present and the relationships that individuals and communities have to landscape and place. For the last decade, she has focused on collaborative methodologies for heritage preservation and collections care as well as issues of heritage accessibility. This has led to partnerships with the Field Museum and the Filipinx community in Chicago, archaeological work with the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Area, and the study of the intersections of memorialization and equitable urban development in Buffalo, among other projects. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation which considers the ways that the community in Barbuda, West Indies, discusses the past and identifies heritage resources while confronting the combined environmental threats of climate change and disaster capitalism. In her free time, she enjoys quilting and walking along the Niagara River with her dog.

Hannah Shepard (OHSS Intensive 2015) holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College where she concentrated in creative writing. Hannah has worked as a script reader for the Public Theater in New York and the Druid Theatre in Galway, and holds Masters degrees in History and Irish Studies from the National University of Ireland and Fordham University in the Bronx. In recent years she has worked as an independent researcher for filmmakers and oral historians on a wide range of projects including The Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame Oral History Project, housed at the University of Kentucky.

Hannah Viti (October Intensive 2022), also known as VITIGRRL, is a proud Chicagoan. She's also a radical, queer, femme dyke, who believes that music helps us feel at home in our bodies. She's the resident DJ of the award-winning party Slo'mo and part of the iconic Good Girls collective - made of legendary DJ's Lori Branch and Lady D. She creates genre-bending soundscapes full of passion and power featuring classic Chicago House, UK Garage, Funk, Soul, Disco, RnB and more. No venue is too big or small for her, igniting dance floors from Chicago's Smartbar to Millennium Park and recently clubs across the country. VITIGRRL is also a sound artist, podcast producer, and sonic historian. In 2020 she graduated from the Sound Arts & Industries Masters program at Northwestern University, where she grew her craft, infusing meaning, archival treasures, and musicality into everything she does.

Harris Bauer (OHSS Intensive 2021) is a writer, editor and curator based in Los Angeles. Her work seeks to navigate the intangible intersection of memory and history. She engages with the role that intergenerational trauma and inherited memory play within archival spaces through experimental ethnography and personal essay. Along with collaborator Rachel Zaretsky she runs Hosting Projects, a platform founded in 2013 specializing in site specific installation, conversation, and development of new works from emerging artists. She has worked on publications, projects and programming for Ugly Duckling Presse, the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive and Wendy's Subway where she helped to develop the Document publication series. Her work has been published by American Chordata, PressPress and Ginger Magazine. She holds a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from SVA.

Hatuey Ramos-Fermín (April Mini-Intensive 2021) is an artist. He has organized projects at sites ranging from small businesses and community centers to churches, streets, galleries, and museums. He has worked at the Center for Urban Pedagogy and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. He has participated in the Elizabeth Foundation for the Art’s Shift Residency and The Laundromat Project’s Create Change Artist Residency. Ramos-Fermín received his BA from the University of Puerto Rico and his MFA from the St. Joost School of Art and Design. He is Director of Programs at The Laundromat Project.

Hayes Sandhaus (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) is unsure about speaking in the third person and has been interested in the Oral History Summer School for a long time and is greatly looking forward to participating. Interested in continual learning and growth, community, and various curiosities. Volunteer background in protecting journalists and youth photography mentoring.

Heather-Lyn Haley (Trauma 2013) I’m a sociologist working with refugee populations in Worcester, MA where I’m an assistant professor of family medicine and community health at UMass Med School and the president of a local non-profit called the Worcester Women’s History Project (WWHP). I’m also working on research using story-telling as a way to combat health disparities at our Center for Health Equity Intervention Research.

Helen Morgan (Radio 2014, OHSS Intensive 2015, Mixed/Memory 2015) is a writer, editor and translator, who also collects stories and loves radio. She has worked for various independent newspapers, art magazines, and human rights organisations, and is currently a Masters student in Migraciones Contemporáneas in Barcelona, Spain. She is also participating in an artist residency at Fabra i Coats, developing a project that engages the local community in a broader dialogue on migration through storytelling, mapping and audio. Through work with a refugee support center, a Muslim women's association, and anti-discrimination organisation, she is also part of an on-going oral history project that explores everyday discrimination.

Hema Music (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) is a London based writer, audio producer and musician, with an academic background in social anthropology. Creating audio brings together all her passions for writing, sound, stories and music in a wonderfully interdiciplinary space which she finds hugely inspiring.

Hicran Kratas (OHSS Intensive 2015) is a research assistant in the progress of attaining her PhD, focusing on Folk law, Gender and Oral history. Oral history is an area which she is focusing on deeply; she has several articles on the WOS database. She is interested in compiling the texts collected during her PhD fieldwork into a composition.

Hiram Perez (OHSS Intensive 2012, Archive 2013) is an Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College, affiliated also with the programs in Africana, Latin American and Latino/a, and Women’s Studies. He teaches courses on immigrant writing, Latino/a literature, methodologies for literary criticism, as well as interdisciplinary seminars on Queer Theory, Queer of Color Critique, Gay Harlem, and Racial Melodrama. In his spare time, he volunteers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, helping to coordinate a Black Gay and Lesbian Archive. He also volunteers with the Vassar Prison Program and plans to offer, within the next two years, a section of Latina/o Literature class at Green Haven Correctional Facility. Currently, he is in the process of creating a Women’s Studies course on “Queering the Archive.” He is interested in stories of queer women at Vassar (and other women’s colleges) before Stonewall, especially those who were expelled. His hope is to find training in oral history and eventually be able to train students to help record these stories.

Holli Cederholm (Family Oral History 2017, Oral History & Writing 2019) Holli Cederholm has spent the last fifteen years immersed in sustainable agriculture—as a farmer, advocate, and freelance writer. She first apprenticed on a farm while in college and, upon completing a B.A. in Environmental Writing in 2007, founded her own small farm focused on celebrating the diversity of open-pollinated and heirloom vegetables. During this time, Holli cut flowers, tinctured herbs, put by the season’s bounty, fermented small batches of tempeh, and accompanied her herd of dairy goats for regular jaunts in the woods. As the former general manager of a national non-profit dedicated to organic seed growers, she authored a peer-reviewed handbook on GMO avoidance strategies for farmers and sat on the opposite side of a courtroom as Monsanto’s lawyers. Holli has also been a steward at Forest Farm, the iconic last home of The Good Life authors Helen and Scott Nearing, and an interim radio host for The Farm Report on Heritage Radio Network. She currently resides in northwestern Connecticut where she continues to grow organic vegetables while working as a writer, digital storyteller, and photographer.

Ibraheem Bangura (Project Design Lab 2024) is a Sierra Leonean-American multi-disciplinary artist who explores the usage of visual/martial arts, poetry, documentary, and blockchain technology as mediums to tell and preserve essential stories. He spent his early childhood in the Bay Area, California, and had formative experiences in countries around the world like Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. He is heavily inspired by the use of art as a medium for sparking important conversations, particularly by what he witnessed and documented in Egypt post-Arab Spring. He has experience in grassroots work and community organizing in the U.S. and has paired his organizing with the arts by presenting his work at events and exhibits to highlight social, cultural, and political issues. In 2021, Ibraheem released a photography collection titled Homecoming as digital collectibles. He used the profits to fund a trip back to his country of origin, Sierra Leone, to discover and document his culture on the blockchain. As a result of that trip, he is currently working on The Tapestry, which is a collection of poetry and song from around the world that explores the utility of emerging technology as a tool for storytelling and cultural preservation.

Ida Yalzadeh (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a PhD student in the department of American Studies at Brown University. She primarily studies race, nation, and the Iranian diaspora through historical and cultural texts, such as stand-up comedy. Her interest in Oral History stems out of her desire to attain a deeper and more effective understanding of identity formation among Iranian Americans during the later half of the twentieth century. While receiving her BA at the University of Chicago in History, she also had the pleasure of working at McSweeney's, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the University of Chicago Press.

Irini Neofotistos (Project Lab 2014) is a former member of the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!) at Hunter College, CUNY. She is currently working with the SLAM! Herstory Project to document and share strategies and lessons learned with current student activists. Most recently, Irini helped build grant and capacity building programs for grassroots activists, cultural arts and social justice networks as the director of the Union Square Awards in New York City. She lives in Astoria, Queens where she grew up.

Isadora Vieira (OHSS Intensive 2019) Isadora Vieira is a filmmaker with 14 years of experience. Currently an MA candidate in Media Studies at The New School, where she is diving deeper into transmedia storytelling and exploring narratives across new mediums; 360 Video and interactive documentaries. Isadora directed, Olho Magico, one of the most watched shows in Brazilian cable. Recently a short erotic film, she co-directed, Amores Liquidos, was picked up by the vanguard platform in adult cinema, X Confessions. She navigates through fiction, documentary and experimental film with ease. Her work delicately gazes at what is genuinely charming in each character, fictional and real. Most invariably her personal work is about women, as she strives for a more accurate representation in media of the female gaze, desires and cycles. Isadora grew up sailing in the brazilian northeast and developed her career between the cities of Rio and São Paulo. Recently she moved to New York, for the third time, in the hopes that the winds will freshen from here on.

Isobel Chiang

Isvett Verde (Oral History Intensive 2024) serves as editor and writer for the New York Times opinion section, where her work focuses on the Latino experience in the United States. She is also an adjunct professor of Latinx Media studies at The City College of New York. She earned a B.A. in French from Florida International University, and an M.A. in Spanish-language Journalism from CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism. She has written about avocado dyes and Walter Mercado, the astrologer so dear to Latinx hearts. Her writing has been featured in the anthology titled "Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness."

Jade Takahashi (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) (she/her) is an audiovisual archivist, cinephile and bibliophile, currently a senior specialist of production and operations with the Oral History Projects department at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a project archivist with Cal State University Monterey Bay's Tanimura & Antle Family Memorial Library and contract archivist for the Esalen Institute. She continues to work with a range of materials and topics that cover local histories, politics, civil engagement and personal growth. In previous roles at AMPAS, she was the archivist for the Oral History Projects department, assisting with the recording, preservation and cataloging of original and legacy audio and visual histories. As an intern, she cataloged small gauge film from the home movie and Master and Masterworks collections. Her interest in home movies and photography has made her the family archivist. She received her B.A. in English Literature and M.A. in Moving Image Archive Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jae Yates (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) has made a long commitment to community organizing in Minneapolis and works in a number of community spaces centered around the liberation of working class people. They are a co-founder and lead volunteer for the Community Aid Network, a volunteer-led mutual aid site that serves between 100-200 families a week and was founded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and systemic racism exacerbated by the murder of George Floyd. They also serve as Field Director for Minneapolis for Community Control of Police, a growing coalition of organizations and Minneapolis residents, working together to amend the city charter to establish an elected Civilian Police Accountability Commission. They are a community organizer for the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice for Jamar where they have co-organized and emceed the Taking Back Pride marches since 2020, a black and trans led protest to police violence and the corporate cooption of Pride. Additionally, Jae’s experience brings a story oriented and historical mindset through their work with the Minnesota Historical Society and as an intern for the Minnesota Youth Story Squad where they documented the George Floyd Uprising through oral history and digital exhibitions while mentoring middle school students. Most recently Jae was honored to accept a position as the Oral Historian for the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project.

Jaime Shearn Coan (OHSS Intensive 2018) is a writer and PhD Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is completing a dissertation titled Metamorphosis Theater: Performance at the Intersection of HIV/AIDS, Race, and Sexuality. He currently serves as a Mellon Digital Publics Fellow at The Graduate Center’s Center for the Humanities. Jaime’s writing has appeared in publications including TDR: The Drama Review, Critical Correspondence, Drain Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2, Movement Research Performance Journal, and Women & Performance. Jaime served as the 2015-2016 Danspace Project Curatorial Fellow, and co-edited the Danspace Project catalogue: Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now (2016).

Jallicia Jolly (OHSS Intensive 2017) is a Jamaican American poet, writer, and HIV/AIDS researcher with a passion for interweaving her interests in health humanities and public history. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Culture at the University of Michigan and a researcher at the National Center for Institutional Diversity, where she integrates her interests in research and praxis on institutional diversity. Stemming from research as a Fulbright Scholar in Jamaica in 2015, her doctoral work focuses on the contemporary politics of HIV/AIDS, reproductive justice, and grassroots health activism. She is interested in using oral history, life histories, ethnography, and digital storytelling to document the lived experiences of HIV-positive Black women in urban contexts in the Caribbean and the United States. Jallicia's commitment to publicly engaged, cross-cultural work on Black women’s intersectional health experiences coupled with her interest in incorporating oral history work in her pedagogical practices energizes her commitment to research-informed social action. She looks forward to connecting with people and communities similarly invested in health humanities, arts activism, and using research as a site of intellectual inquiry and social engagement.

Janice Brockley (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016, Mixed/Memory 2015): I’m a historian of disability and health with a focus on children and families. I’ve previously written about the twentieth century parents of intellectually disabled children and supposed parental “mercy killings” in the 1930s. I’m currently working on a study of intellectual disability in Mississippi in the decades after the Brown decision. I’m not a native Mississippian nor a southern historian so I’ve been immersing myself lately in Mississippi history, trying to catch up. I’m an associate professor at Jackson State, Mississippi’s largest historically black university. I teach courses in the history of the U.S., black women, public health, disability, and childhood. I have some theoretical knowledge of oral history and last summer I took a workshop in mixed ability interviewing with OHSS. This summer, I’m hoping to work on designing my own oral history project and gaining practical skills as an interviewer.

Jared Miracle (OHSS Intensive 2014) is a PhD student specializing in folklore and folklife in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. His dissertation tells the story of how Americans came to adopt and adapt East Asian martial arts after World War II, and what meaning they hold for the current community of practitioners. Jared received a degree in Asian studies from Purdue University and his research interests include folk culture, narrative, physical culture, religion and the supernatural, myth, performance, transnationalism, and play.

Jasmine Stein (OHSS Intensive 2013, Radio 2013): I was born in 1989 and my family moved from the U.S. to Berlin, Germany, a few months before the wall fell. I lived there until age 19, when I moved to New York City to attend the Cooper Union School of Art, my alma mater.

Jason Gots (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) wrote the memoir Humanity is Trying: Experiments in Living with Grief, Finding Connection, and Resisting Easy Answers (HarperCollins, 2022). His short fiction, essays, and other writings have been published by Dark Lane Anthology, LitHub, Tor.com, Big Think, and Lion's Roar. Jason produced and hosted Clever Creature, an experimental variety podcast of songs, short fiction, and conversation. From 2015-2020 he produced the podcast Think Again, interviewing artists and thinkers including Terry Gilliam, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and many more. Jason teaches audio storytelling in Columbia University’s Graduate Writing Program and is currently working on his first novel. More at www.jasongots.com

Jason Marlow (Shaking the Family Tree 2017) is a Filmmaker (narrative and documentary) living in Hudson, NY. He’s also a co-owner of the soon to be operating sail cargo company Hudson Sail Freight. He was born far from the ocean in Oklahoma, and later moved with his mother to rural Mississippi where he was introduced to both great music, and well told tall tales.

Jay Saper (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) conducts walking tours, writes zines, and makes art about radical Jewish history.

Jeanne Hutchins (OHSS Intensive 2012, Trauma 2013, Doc Film 2013, Radio 2013, I Am Sitting In A Room 2017): I have had the pleasure and privilege of working as a clinical social worker for the past twenty four years and therefore have been privy to the amazing story of others. I have wondered for a long time how to respectfully put these experiences and cultural histories into another framework to be shared. For the past four years, my primary focus has been in providing clinical services specific to trauma and torture recovery with Somali Bantu refugees, an amazing animistic-nomadic people who lived as farmers in the Jubba/ Shebelle River Valley prior to a prolonged draconian displacement as a result of civil war. Many hours have been spent in listening to the stories of phases such as these: life before, the complexities of prolonged loss during flight, refugee camps/multiple relocations, adjustment to an unknown culture, survival through spiritual practices, cultural beliefs, and a long tradition of storytelling. My home is in Maine where I have a private clinical practice.

Jeanne Segal (December Mini Intensive 2021) has a BA in Cultural Anthropology and after many decades promoting the stories of others while working in public relations, seeks to collect the stories of individuals who haven't had the opportunity to make their voices heard. She aims to work with lifelong Washington, DC natives who have witnessed a dramatic transformation of their city as well as individuals from historically black communities in suburban Maryland.

Jeannette Bruno (OHSS Intensive 2021): I am an Instructor Librarian and Library Department Chairperson at Wilbur Wright College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. While completing my MLIS at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign I served as a Mix IT Up! Fellow working with youth at the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School in Chicago. Before library school I worked as an Academic Advisor for high school students in Chicago-area high schools. I have worked as an advocate and educator for Chicago youth and students of all ages. I hope use what I learn at the Oral History Summer School to help preserve our cultural heritage and connect future generations to our shared culture.

Jeff Nagle (OHSS Intensive 2016): I am a PhD student in the history and sociology of science; specifically, I work on the history of environment, labor, and technology around deindustrialization and the combined urban-environmental crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. I focus on community responses to capital flight and environmental injustice, on the different futures imagined by capital, experts, community activists, and technological futurists, some spectacular, some quotidian, in cities and countrysides in Pennsylvania, the upper peninsula of Michigan, and southern Appalachia.

Jen Griffith (OHWS Family 2015): During the farming season, I work at Queens County Farm Museum in Queens, NY, a community farm that grows vegetables, educates the public, and preserves a historic farm. I am in the agricultural department there and grow, harvest, and market the vegetables. I also take care of the livestock and do public education by managing our volunteers days and hosting Farmer Led Tours. During the winter season, for the past two farming seasons, I have been working with The Greenhorns to develop an oral history project interviewing the elders in the Grange Movement (a populist farmer movement/fraternal agrarian organization with an interesting political and social past). We have been touring California with this project for the month of December collecting oral histories along the way and doing events based highlighting the rich history and potential future of the Grange in the farming community. I tend to have an interest in crafts and historical knowledge that I think could enrich our lives today. I am interested in preserving technical skills, lore, and people's personal stories. I enjoy getting a glimpse into the past and truly understanding how our current access to technology and transportation has changed our environment. I am interested in understanding what elements of life are at the essence of what it means to be human.

Jen Weidner (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022): I am a Reference Librarian at a Southern Indiana public library. I received my Masters in Library and Information Science from Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis in May 2020. I have a podcast that focuses on local history, interviews with residents of my city and things going on in the library. I have been working on several oral history projects as well as designing and instructing people on how to record their stories. I am passionate about recording as many peoples stories as I can so people in the future can have access to their families history.

Jen Zoble (Song Collecting and Composing 2023) translates Balkan literature into English, teaches writing and translation, and longs to make more sound-based work after having produced an audio drama podcast (Play for Voices, 2016-2021), dabbled in audio essay writing, and studied voice and guitar for several years. Recent translations include Sweetlust by Asja Bakić (Feminist Press, 2023) and Call Me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić (Sandorf Passage, 2021). Her translation of Mars by Asja Bakić (Feminist Press, 2019) was named one of the Best Fiction Books of 2019 by Publishers Weekly. Zoble is on the faculty of Liberal Studies at NYU, where in addition to teaching she coordinates the university's new undergraduate minor in translation studies.

Jennie Morrison (Verso Mini Intensive 2019, Project Design Lab 2024) as a background in social work, youth development, oral history, and nonprofit communications, and has worked primarily with children, families, and communities in Seattle and New York City. She is particularly interested in the voices of workers in children and family serving systems, including the public education and child welfare. During a Masters in Social Work program, she developed an interest in storytelling and narrative as tools for healing, human connection, and social change. This led her to the Columbia University Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program, where she became interested in the relationship between oral history and social work practices.

Jennifer Garcon (Trauma 2013) is a doctoral student of Latin American history, with a particular interest in Haiti. She is interested in questions of translation, constituent/constituted power and forced migration. Her current research centers on experiences of Haitian exile and the attendant cultural production of historical memory during the Duvalier regime (1957-1986).

Jenniffer Woodson (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) As the archivist for the Ayn Rand Archives, I'm responsible for processing and preserving Ayn Rand’s personal and professional papers and other related collections. As the department manager, I assist researchers, answer reference questions, and supervise interns and volunteers. I'm also managing our newest oral history project (on the formation and early years of the Objectivist movement). I'm interested in everything related to oral histories, including issues concerning memory, annotation, and best practices for eliciting information on sensitive topics.

Jennifer Zackin (OHSS Intensive 2019) For the last 20 years Jennifer Zackin has been integrating public art, social sculpture, installation, performance, collaboration, ceremony, photography, video, collage and drawing into acts of reverence and reciprocity. Whether wrapping trees in patterns of brightly colored rope, growing medicinal herbs in a public garden for public use, offering large masses of rose petals to oceans and lakes, creating absorbent tentacles ("hair booms") out of salvaged materials to aid in the clean-up efforts of toxic spills, Zackin seeks to engage and create community in her process, bringing art and ritual into everyday life. Every act is an exploration of exchange, communion, performance, skill-sharing and mark-making. Her work has been exhibited in national and international museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Spertus Museum, Rose Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden - Norway, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Zacheta National Art Gallery - Warsaw, Poland. Commissions include Governors Island with LMCC, Katonah Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park and MASS MOcA at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens. She is the recipient of fellowships including Art Omi, Atlantic Center for the Arts and Skowhegan.

Jen Zoble (OHSS Intensive 2021, Project Design Lab 2024) translates Balkan literature into English, teaches writing and translation, and longs to make more sound-based work after having produced an audio drama podcast (Play for Voices, 2016-2021), dabbled in audio essay writing, and studied voice and guitar for several years. Recent translations include Sweetlust by Asja Bakić (Feminist Press, 2023) and Call Me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić (Sandorf Passage, 2021). Her translation of Mars by Asja Bakić (Feminist Press, 2019) was named one of the Best Fiction Books of 2019 by Publishers Weekly. Zoble is on the faculty of Liberal Studies at NYU, where in addition to teaching she coordinates the university's new undergraduate minor in translation studies.

Jenny Burman (OHSS Intensive 2017) is an academic who lives in Montreal and teaches at McGill University in Communication Studies. She wrote a book called Transnational Yearnings, about the multiple connections (economic, social, cultural, emotional) between Toronto and Jamaica. These days she works on the intersection of gender-based violence, urban 'blight', and trauma-rooted addiction. She is new to oral history but excited about what people's personal narratives could bring to this and other projects.

Jenny Goldberg (OHSS Intensive 2014, Family History 2015, Radio 2015, Collecting and Composing 2015, Mixed/Memory 2015) is currently working as an archivist for fine art photographer, Joel Meyerowitz. She also does freelance transcription work for oral historians, publications, and non-profit organizations. Previously, she worked as a book editor at Aperture Foundation, a non-profit photography organization. She has a BA in Documentary Studies from the College of Santa Fe.

Jenny Kane (OHSS Intensive 2012, Radio 2013, OHWS Family 2015, OHWS Radio 2015): I live in Brooklyn (after many years in the East Village) and work on movies/tv/commercials as an electrician. I’ve just completed my MA in Media Studies at the New School where I took audio/radio classes, a short course in Oral History as Documentary, and several seminars which used the city as a laboratory. I made a short video about Tug Boats which introduced me to the New York waterfront and I’ve recently been involved with waterfront organizations and maritime preservation projects. I studied history in college and later photography at the International center of Photography in NYC and I’ve been an addicted listener to WNYC since moving here in 1983. I’ve always been interested in hearing stories of places that no longer exist or have changed dramatically and the “small” stories about people’s lives and the city’s neighborhoods. I’m interested in using oral history for radio stories (Sound Portraits’ radio documentaries are some of my favorites) and multi-media projects.

Jeremy Mazur (Oral History for Organizations 2021) is a graduate student in the History Program at San Diego State University. He also works with the MCRD San Diego Command Museum. His recent oral history projects have included documenting the base's response to COVID-19 as well as gender integration in Marine recruit training in San Diego.

Jeremy Thal (Radio 2014) is a French horn player, composer, educator, and co-founder of Found Sound Nation, a collective of musicians and artists who leverage the unique power of creative sound-making to help build strong, just, healthy communities. With Found Sound Nation he has co-led collaborative sound-making projects in NYC, Haiti, Zimbabwe, New Orleans, Mexico, Senegal, Indonesia, Italy, and Switzerland. Jeremy studied ethnomusicology and Chinese at Northwestern University, and continues to work as a performer. As a French horn player and multi-instrumentalist, Jeremy has recorded and toured with Neutral Milk Hotel and The National, and leads his own band, Briars of North America.

Je-Shawna Wholley (Shaking the Family Tree 2024): Unapologetically Black and queer, Je-Shawna Wholley was born in North Carolina, radicalized in Atlanta and is currently living in Chicago, IL. Care and space making are at the center of her life’s work. She thrives best when she is learning, serving and growing at the intersections of Black healing and liberation movements. In 2022 she founded the Earthseed Black Family Archive Project. Through Earthseed, Je-Shawna supports Black people who are interested in delving into their own family history work, in community, and creating something from what they find. She is an experienced facilitator helping groups integrate big ideas into practical action. Years of project management and curriculum building make her an ideal thought partner for those in need of deep impact programming, processes creation, and shifting through themes in order to produce creative and useful outcomes.

Jess Lamar Reece Holler (OHSS Intensive 2016) is a PhD. student in Penn's Department of English Literature, and, in May of 2016, completed her MA in Public-Sector Folk Studies in the Dept. of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University. Jess works as a public-sector and applied folklorist and community-based oral historian with a strong interest in the histories and futures of sustainable agriculture, food systems, food access, environmental justice, and the power and meaning of place and experience and movement histories of displacement. In 2015, Jess completed an oral history project with the Kentucky Oral History Commission on the history and community memory of the Christian-Trigg Farms Project -- a New Deal Resettlement Farm built in Christian County, Kentucky, to promote principles of conservation agriculture. At present, she is directing two new oral history projects: a community-collaborative effort in the Eastwick neighborhood of Philadelphia on community memory around urban renewal removals, activism, and organizing around site-based environmental toxicity, in partnership with Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities (PPEH) and the Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition (EFNC) ; and a statewide oral history and archives project with the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA) on the rise of the ecological agriculture movement in Ohio, and the spaces and places in which agricultural training becomes ecological activism. Jess is especially interested in models for community co-curated, collaborative practice; and in digital, physical and map-based tools for emplace-ing oral history & providing rich context for spatial memory and experience. She has also served as an oral history intern with the Ohio History Connection, and has worked on Philadelphia's Stadium Stompers Oral History Project and as a fieldwork/documentation intern around food access for Wholesome Wave/Columbus, Ohio's VeggieSNAPs nutrition incentive program. Jess is a proud native of Columbus, where she lives most of the time with the world's best border collie, Isaly Caledonia!

Jess Puglisi (OHWS Radio 2015) is Managing Editor of Fence / Fence Books, as well as Programs Coordinator at Wave Farm. Prior to her position as Programs Coordinator, he spent over two years as Outreach Coordinator of ave Farm program division WGXC 90.7-FM, a creative community radio station. Driven foremost by an impulse to observe and document, ess has followed a meandering trajectory underpinned by a passion for the study of character and place. As a result of her engagement with WGXC, he learned to employ audio recording as a means of portraying encounters and occurrences in and around New York's Greene and Columbia Counties. Past work includes a series of features documenting the town of Prattsville in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene, produced for and aired on WGXC. She intends to continue to contribute her energies to the record of the lesser-seen.

Jessica Blankenship (Song Collecting and Composing 2023): Whether it is concert event planning, researching, or conducting historical interviews, Jessica Blankenship enjoys exploring Kentucky's rich musical heritage. Jessica founded the Heritage Music Series in her hometown of London and is involved in community enrichment events. Even though she loves all forms of music, she founded the Kentucky Country Music website and social media pages to spotlight upcoming talent. In 2019, she was named one of Laurel County's Top 10 Under 40. Jessica has been featured on WSM, RFDTV, PBS, and other national and statewide tv and radio programming promoting Kentucky music.

Jessica Chappe (December Mini Intensive 2021, Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023): I am a mixed media storyteller based in Catskill, NY. My projects focus on how people find belonging through community, place and self. I believe in the power of collaboration through audio storytelling and documentary photography to expand our understanding of humanity and what keeps us connected. In 2016 I graduated from Bard College with a BA in photography and a concentration in Human Rights. Upon graduation I worked for David Hume Kennerly, The Metabolic Studio, and the Los Angeles Center for Photography while I continued to pursue my work between 2016-19. I was shortlisted in 2020 for the Open Competition and Alpha Female Awards in the Sony World Photography Awards. After moving back to the East Coast in 2020, I worked for Wendy Ewald as an archivist and my photo essay “Inside a 22-Person Pandemic Pod in a Hudson Valley Hotel,” was published in New York Magazine's Curbed section in July 2021. Since 2021 I have been working with the Times Union focusing on communities in the Hudson Valley region, working as a part time project manager and archivist for Melissa Auf der Maur and freelancing as an independent artist.

Jessica Cottle (Oral History for Educators 2019) I recently earned my Public History MA from Appalachian State University. I am currently the Justice, Equality, and Community Project Archivist with Davidson College as part of a campus-wide Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant focused on grappling with local issues related to race, religion, and social justice. As part of my position, I work closely with colleagues and faculty to incorporate archival materials into courses addressing these themes, as well as engage students and the local community to expand and diversify our archival collections. I applied for the Oral History Winter School to gain experience in producing and teaching oral history as part of these efforts. I am particularly interested in exploring Oral History as a pedagogical tool for empowering students as active participants in the life cycle of institutional memory by looking at curricular integration, collaborative project development, and student-led collecting.

Jessica Gingrich (November Mini Intensive 2023) is an independent journalist, researcher, and archivist based in New York.

Jessica Lamb-Shapiro (OHSS Intensive 2012, Radio 2013): I first encountered oral history through OHSS 2012, and have been a little obsessed ever since. I’m a writer interested in a family history project, as well as hoping to incorporate some oral history into my professional work. My non-fiction book, Promise Land: A Journey Through America’s Euphoric, Soul-Sucking, Emancipating, Hornswoggling, and Irrepressible Self-Help Culture, will be published by Simon and Schuster in Jan 2014.

Jessica Lim (April Mini-Intensive 2021): I am a philosophy and humanities teacher at a college in Montreal. In my philosophy courses, I talk about meaning as the disclosure of new perspectives, and of the importance of the not-yet thought. I tie these themes to memory, especially memory as a presencing and lived experience. I am interested in how oral history can help work out the fundamental relationship between memory and meaning.

Joan Toohey Wesman (November Mini Intensive 2023) is a professor of Digital Media Studies at Principia College, a small liberal arts college in rural Illinois, where she has created courses in Podcasting and also Gender, Race, and Class in Media. Prior to becoming a professor, Joan worked as a producer on Fresh Air with Terry Gross for twenty years. During that time she went to South Africa to help cover their first democratic elections, worked on a radio documentary on Pearl Harbor using original interviews and archival radio sound, and created an award-winning radio call-in book discussion show called Storyline. She has an MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching, English) from Brown University, and a B.A. from Hamilton College.

JoAnn LoSavio (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a second year Phd student of history at Northern Illinois University. She has a B.A. in history, anthropology, and a minor in Southeast Asian studies from the same institution, and a M.A. in anthropology from Emory University. Her dissertation project focuses on young women of Burma and Malaya in the 1950s and 1960s, and their pursuit of higher education in the metropole. In general, she is interested in transnational links through “overseas” education, and the impact of these processes on post-Colonial Southeast Asian culture and society.

Joanna Thompson (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) Joanna Thompson is a graduate student in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute. She is currently based in Brooklyn and works in Records Management at the NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY) , where she is responsible for processing physical and digital materials regarding the DSNY artist-in-residence. She previously received an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology at Freie Universitaet Berlin (2018) and a BA in Cultural Anthropology and Fine Art from the University of Louisville (2014). She was born in Germany, raised in Kentucky, and spent several years living in Turkey. These international moves led to her interest in studying diaspora communities in the United States and Europe. For her first MA thesis, she wrote about notions of belonging and non-belonging among Middle Eastern leftists in New York City. Additionally, Joanna is interested in and writes on critical pedagogy and research methods and methodology, including oral history.

Joaquín (October Intensive 2022) is an art worker and death worker-in-training living in Brooklyn, NY. They organize public programs for an art museum, collaborating with artists and communities in the borough to produce performance, live music, and other kinds of artist-centered activations. Across life and work, they are interested in collaboration, ritual, public gathering, the radical possibilities of friendship and extralegal and informal care networks. Their learning and thinking are informed by disability justice, abolitionist organizing, queer and trans activism, and social liberation movements.

Jodi Clough (Mixed/Memory 2015): I was born and raised in the rural communities in Upstate New York. I hold a BA in Human Relations. Most of my adult life, I lived and worked in New York City and Washington, DC as an Estate Manager. Recently, I came back to Columbia County to care for my grandmother. Upon her passing, I began working at Camphill Ghent when it opened in 2011. I started as a Home Health Aide but now work full time in the Activities Department. At Camphill, I discovered I love working with the elder population! Currently, I live in a 1820 renovated Greek revival with my adorable yellow lab, Wiggles in Valatie, NY. I enjoying reading, cooking, traveling and spending time with my friends, family and of course, Wiggles!

John Marchese (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a Lecturer in Spanish at Valparaiso University in Indiana and is currently completing his dissertation titled "Religion, Revolution, and the Realm of the Literary in Twentieth Century Central American Prose." This project is related to his more general concerns about the relation between church and state interaction with both progressive and reactionary political movements. He is interested to incorporate oral history components into some of his Spanish courses and is also part of a team that is working to elaborate a history of Su Casa Catholic Worker, a Chicago-based organization that originally housed survivors of torture from Central America, and has gradually expanded its mission to provide a community garden, a soup kitchen, and shelter and case management for homeless families over its 26-year history.

John Serafin (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) arrived at radio in his early forties, playing records and hanging out with kids half his age at Northwestern University's station, WNUR. The experience was both awkward and rewarding. As a web developer, he comes to the Oral History Summer School with very little interview, audio or editing experience but with a enormous amount of enthusiasm and love for radio. He currently hosts The Midnight Crisis, Wednesday nights on Chicago's CHIRP Radio.

Jon Earle (Experimental Ethnographies 2018): I'm an independent audio producer in Brooklyn, NY. Before that, I was a print journalist in Moscow, Russia and a producer at StoryKeep, a company that makes family history documentaries.

Jordan Fickle (OHSS Intensive 2019) I am a life-long learner, dedicated dog-mom, hiking aficionado, burgeoning world-traveler, and clinical social worker from Fayetteville, Arkansas. My interest in oral history is driven by personal dreams and professional intentions. Through my experiences, I have learned the power stories have to empower and protect, educate and preserve, connect and change. My goal is to learn how to cultivate, collect, and perpetuate the voices of others in order to create a meaningful and enduring narrative legacy.

Jordan Sand (April Mini-Intensive 2021): I teach Japanese and Asian history at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and live in Tokyo for part of each year. When I was a grad student in Tokyo in the late 1980s, I had the good fortune to join up with a group of people who had created a local quarterly magazine of oral history. The magazine had a tremendous impact on community activism. I have written about that experience in a book called Tokyo Vernacular. Recently, I have been working with colleagues in several Asian cities on a project to collect oral histories from settlers in marginal and informal neighborhoods.

Jose Ortega (Experimental Ethnographies 2018): José Ortega is the Exhibit and Collections Coordinator for Community Museums located in Pueblo. José is responsible for curating the objects and memories that help us to tell stories in our museums and communities. Even before he worked for History Colorado, he assisted El Pueblo History Museum in working with the Salt Creek Memory Project. He worked with the community and helped to collect stories. He is now staff of History Colorado and is serving as the lead person on the Dogpatch Memory Project, in addition to his many other exhibits and collections duties throughout the state. José intuitively knows how to work in community and guide community in the Museum of Memory process. He will benefit from this program in discovering ways to take what he does intuitively and develop pathways, methods, and training to empower others to lead this work.

Joseph Harold Larnerd (Oral History for Educators 2019) I am a Ph.D. candidate in the art history program at Stanford University. My research and teaching attend to the social histories of American material and visual culture from the late-eighteenth century to the present. Much of my recent work considers how artworks and artifacts have intervened in popular understandings and enactments of social class, privilege, and mobility. I am especially invested in exploring the roles of such objects in the lives and labors of the working classes, whether as representations, products of their efforts, or possessions. My dissertation-in-progress, “Decorative Cut Glass and the Working Class in America, 1876 to 1916,” offers one such history of cut glass, domestic glassware incised with geometric patterns and popular around the turn of the century. This project has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Winterthur Museum, the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, and others. I am currently the Douglass Foundation Fellow in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I will finish my dissertation this spring.

Josephine Shokrian (OHSS Intensive 2012) makes filmic experiments in private and fabricated environments in public. An early interest in documentation and critique emerged from the years spent in an image-saturated, materialistically-driven, internationally known zip code. Using a commandeered camcorder to dislocate the figure in disfigurement — as a person living with physical impairments, to taking interviews with teenage peers telling tales of self-image. Most notable achievements include a recent clearance of all medical debt and art directing Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” Shokrian lives and works in New York City.

Josh Mattison: I am a producer, writer, editor, composer and sound designer. I've created an audio magazine called Low Orbit and an audio documentary called The Order of Death. Low Orbit is an audio magazine featuring voices, stories and sounds from Colorado’s creative community. It features a wide variety of things; short documentaries, memoir, fiction and non-fiction pieces, poetry, music, comedy, even avant-garde soundscapes. Westword magazine called it the Best Podcast in Denver in 2017. The Order of Death is a documentary podcast about the 1984 murder of Denver area talk radio host Alan Berg by a white supremacist group known as The Order. The documentary went on the win the Best Crime Podcast award in Westword magazine in 2020. I’ve created work for several museums including MCA Denver and MoMa NYC. In 2018 I was the associate producer on the podcast documentary A Daughter’s Voice for the Clyfford Still Museum which won a Bronze Muse award from the American Association of Museums. I’m interested in creating sound rich and artistically presented stories. I like to explore personal narratives, philosophical ideas, historical stories and the like. I’m most interested in ideas that go beyond mainstream narratives and dig under the surface.

Joy Xiang (Oral History for Organizations 2021) (she/her) thinks about where poetry might meet arts criticism might meet the charged liberation of dancing in dark rooms with other hungry ghosts. Born in Shanghai, she now writes, edits, and perpetually blooms from Tkaronto/Toronto.

Judith Stone (OHSS Intensive 2013) is an editor and writer whose most recent nonfiction book, When She Was White, was named one of the Washington Post’s top 100 books of 2007. She was the features editor of the late, lamented Mirabella, and a contributing editor at O, The Oprah Magazine, Discover, Glamour, andHealth. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York, Smithsonian, and many other publications. Judy was on the founding board of The Moth, the storytelling organization, and has served as curator, storyteller, host and outreach volunteer. She lives in Brooklyn.

Jules Bradley (Song Collecting and Composing 2023) (she/her) is a producer and farmer living in Portland, Maine. She is the co-creator of the youth-centered climate podcast Inherited and and freelance teacher and producer. She has created works for BBC Short Cuts and teaches courses for the Salt Institute. She is plays the fiddle and the banjo and is part of the traditional music and dance community in Maine. She also farms in the summer and is hoping to start her own cooperative farm in the future.

Julia Gottlieb (OHSS Intensive 2019) Originally from Oak Park, IL, Julia Gottlieb is a rising senior at Scripps College working towards her BA in American Studies and dance. As a student, she is interested in public space, social movements, performance, and collective memory. Through her studies, she has been introduced to various modes of narrative storytelling such as movement, non-fiction creative writing, and more recently, oral history.

Julia Hanlon (OHWS Radio 2015) is the podcast host of Running On Om, yoga teacher, long-distance runner, and student of life. Julia’s three main loves are storytelling, yoga, and running. The Running On Om Podcast interviews innovative minds from yoga, running, spiritual, and health backgrounds. In spring 2014, Julia graduated from Bates College, with a BA and a double major in ethnomusicology and religious studies. Julia’s ethnomusicology thesis was an oral history focused on kirtan (chanting) artist Jai Uttal. She spent the Fall 2014 in Ethiopia working with young Ethiopian female runners. Julia is excited to develop a podcast interview with renowned Ethiopian runner, Haile Gebrselassie.

Julie A. Fisher (Oral History Intensive 2024) is an educator and public historian, and currently with the National Archives. She has previously worked in archives and special collections. She has taught American history to both college and high school students. Her publications have explored early American history, Indigenous history, transcription, and paleography.

Julie Golia (OHSS Intensive 2015): I am a historian of 20th century America, media, and gender. Currently, I'm the Director of Public History at Brooklyn Historical Society, where I have curated digital and physical exhibitions about Brooklyn's agricultural origins, Civil War correspondence and photography, and the history of Brooklyn's waterfront. I'm also the co-founder and editor of TeachArchives.org, a robust educational website that brings innovative teaching exercises and articles on pedagogy to a national audience.

Julie Nudd (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) I have a BA in English and a Masters in Special Education. I have worked in the Chicago Public School system for twenty years, teaching on the south and west sides of the city. I have taught in a variety of classroom settings as the standards for teaching special education have changed over the years. Currently, I am writing a novel based on the institutionalized racism I witnessed in CPS.

Julie Rogers (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a public historian working in public radio. She holds an MA in history from American University and a BA in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include American popular culture, gender, media and sound studies. As a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress, she worked with pulp magazine collection, a dream come true for the self-proclaimed science fiction geek and detective story aficionada. Currently, Rogers is a member of NPR’s Research, Archives & Data Strategy team and is working to expand institutional knowledge by collecting oral histories from NPR colleagues. Her project focuses on NPR’s early news reporting and the organization’s commitment to promoting the diversity of on-air voices.

Juone Kadiri (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) is currently an instructor at Salt Lake Community College. She teaches Ethnic Studies and social work. Juone Kadiri pursued her Ph.D. in African Studies from Howard University. As a part of her dissertation research, she conducted in-depth family and individual interviews with multigenerational Ghanaian families in the Virginia, District of Columbia, and Maryland exploring identity and cultural development and studying the heterogeneousness of identity and identity formation. She has a Master of Social Work from The University of Georgia, she also attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and received a Bachelor’s in Social Work. Her main teaching interests include preparing first generation students and community members to utilize qualitative research methods to capture the stories of their communities. To that end she enjoys teaching and researching to enhance the understandings of the complexity of the changing world, and the dynamics and diversity of the world community. She is building service-learning projects that will help students extend what they have learned in the classroom into the communities. By first exploring their family history they will ground themselves in knowing their own stories, they will then connect with local communities and connect the similarities and differences with what they have learned about themselves.

Justin Schell (OHSS “Talking White” 2022) is the Director of the Shapiro Design Lab, a peer and engaged learning community in the University of Michigan Library. His work in the Design Lab includes a variety of multimedia, community science, and public knowledge partnership projects in addition to consultation and instruction for individuals and courses. Besides working at the Lab, he is a filmmaker, visual artist, and podcast producer. He holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota’s Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society program, where he completed a multimodal dissertation on immigrant hip-hop in Minnesota. He was a Council on Library and Information Resources Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota Libraries, where he founded the Minnesota Hip-Hop Collection, which is part of the Givens Collection at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Kaitlyn Schwalje (OHSS Intensive 2016) lives in Brooklyn, NY. After studying physics at Carnegie Mellon University she worked as a research associate at Walt Disney Imagineering building wearable technologies. During design graduate school in Copenhagen, she investigated the science and design behind efforts to preserve our world’s agricultural diversity. Kaitlyn is fascinated by the mechanisms that govern how everything works, from physical architectures to people and their behaviors. She is currently developing a podcast featuring NYC-local scientists speaking about their work, dreams, struggles, and predictions. She is a contributing producer for WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show. Her work has appeared in Wired, Fast Company and The Creators Project. Reading about Joe Gould brought her here.

Kara Westerman (OHSS Radio 2015, OHSS Intensive 2017) is an alumna of The Oral History Winter School in 2015. She is a published fiction author, teacher, podcaster, oral history facilitator, and fearless leader of Amagansett Writer’s Collective. She received her MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and received the Edward Albee Foundation residency fellowship. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Ohio Review, the anthology, Submerged: Tales From the Basin, and The East Hampton Star. She is now a feature writer for the newspaper The East End Beacon. She created the podcast, AmagansettLand for the Amagansett Free Library, and she produces and hosts a podcast called Phantom Hampton: Stories From Where The Rest Of Us Live. Please visit her on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/phantomhampton where you can hear most of her articles in extended form. She lives and works in East Hampton, New York.

Karen Gardner (OHSS Assistant 2013) is a writer, radio producer, and resident of Hudson, NY. Her written work thus far explores new analyses of microeconomic development theory, including critiques within labor economics, urban economics, and community-based development. Her work has included an interview-based project in the Ilam region of eastern Nepal analyzing the power dynamics involved in a tea factory’s conversion to organic production. A subsequent project analyzes USAID’s agricultural technology interventions in Nepal. She has recently begun co-hosting a radio show on Hudson’s community radio station WGXC with fellow Oral History Summer School students Melinda Braathen and Sara Kendall. She is also a baker and runner. Karen received her Bachelor’s in Economics at Bard College.

Karen L. Lew Biney-Amissah (OHSS Intensive 2018) is a lifelong New Yorker, an educator who works in informal learning environments, a budding public historian, and researcher with an interest in revealing hidden histories. Most recently, she served as Senior Educator at the High Line, a formerly abandoned elevated railway transformed into a public park, where she created and designed learning experiences built around connections to place and personal narratives. Karen is also an experienced administrator of after school programs and has worked as an educator at several cultural institutions in the New York City area, including the Museum of Chinese in America, Save Ellis Island, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts. She is fascinated by the life of urban environments and how cities work.

Karen Rodriguez: (October Mini Intensive 2021) I am a former, longtime staff member of the United Nations, mostly based at NY Headquarters in an often hectic, highly visible part of Conference Services. I also served on field missions working with diverse communities in such places as Namibia, Angola and El Salvador in the lead up to their respective national elections after long and terrible periods of conflict. I have a Master of Public Health in International Health and Development from Tulane University, in New Orleans and a Master of Arts in a Great Books program from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As an undergraduate I majored in Psychology, Spanish Literature and delved into Anthropology. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo, West Africa. I consider myself a lifelong student and traveller. Recently, I have been working as a volunteer with asylum seekers to help them document and translate their stories of survival and resilience in the face of trauma and violence. I challenge myself making sculpture in clay.

Karen Shakerdge (OHSS Intensive 2013): My academic background is in anthropology and media studies, via The New School. Since finishing my studies in 2008 I’ve been working in TV and documentary production. For the past two years, I’ve been working at a small independent production company where I’ve focused on research, conducting preliminary interviews, fieldwork, editing media and story development for feature length documentaries. Most recently, I’ve been focusing my time on fundraising and development for a few projects that are not yet in production.

Kasia Mychajlowycz (KASH-a ma-HI-low-vich) (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) is an audio producer and journalist, and special projects producer at The Globe and Mail. Last year, she produced and co-wrote In Her Defence, a limited 8-part narrative podcast about domestic violence and a woman’s fight for freedom, which reached #1 in the true crime and overall podcast charts for Apple Podcasts in Canada. In 2021, she developed and launched the Globe and Mail’s daily podcast, The Decibel, as senior producer. Previously, Kasia has produced for shows including NPR’s Planet Money, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s On the Media, and Canadaland. Kasia reported, hosted, wrote and co-produced the limited series Cool Mules, for which she won a Gold Digital Publishing Award in 2021.

Kate Blofson (OHSS Intensive 2013, I Am Sitting In A Room 2017): In recent years, I've worked as a beekeeper and moonlight in the winter as an oral historian. For my graduate thesis in Natural Resources, I conducted a place-based oral history project about the Winooski intervale, and was then hired by the Vermont Historical Society to collect oral histories for the Vermont 70s Project. Prior to my Vermont life, among other endeavors, I worked as a community organizer for the Prometheus Radio Project.

Kate Borchard Schoen: (Oral History Intensive 2024) am a consulting public historian and creative, and a native Californian who has lived and worked in the South for over 12 years. I work on public history, oral history, and digital humanities projects that are guided by a storytelling, community-driven, collaborative, and truth-telling ethos and practice. Currently, I am the Project Director for the South Carolina Preservation Toolkit project through WeGOJA Foundation, which will help Black communities preserve historic spaces and places. I am also the Project Lead/Oral Historian for the Taveau Church Oral History Project, a collaborative community initiative to document the legacy of one of the oldest still standing Black churches in SC. Prior to consulting, I was Curator at the SC State Park Service, where I interpreted African American history at state parks and led community-based projects. I founded and co-led the Union County Community Remembrance Project (an Equal Justice Initiative sponsored project), a grassroots, community-led public memory project remembering the history of lynching and racial violence in Union County, SC. I received my MA in Public History from University of South Carolina in 2019, where my thesis research examined the Women of the Ku Klux Klan and their white supremacist impact on the educational system. Outside of work, I love swimming, reading cheesy romance novels, taking pottery classes, and writing bad poetry.

Kate Drabinski (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) teaches gender, women's, and sexuality studies at UMBC, where she also directs a feminist leadership program. She is co-editor with Nicole King and Josh Davis of Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City. She leads walking tours in Baltimore focused on LGBTQ and radical political histories. She is developing an oral history project with students focused on LGBTQIA+ communities in the Baltimore region.

Kate Ratcliff (OHSS Intensive 2015) is a Professor in American Studies at Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont. She moved to Marlboro 26 years ago with her husband and two year old son, with one chapter left of her dissertation on historic suburbia and no experience teaching at a tiny college or living in the country. She finished the dissertation, had a second child, and fell in love with Marlboro College and the mountains of southern Vermont. One of the joys of teaching at Marlboro is the freedom to develop and pursue new academic interests. Her graduate training focused on turn-of-the-twentieth century social and cultural history and archival research methods, but she’s enjoyed teaching a diverse range of subjects, including consumer culture and mass media, contemporary feminism and environmental history.

Kate Singh (she/her) (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) is a former classroom teacher and educator committed to examining how we teach and learn history. She earned her BA in English and Religious Studies at Washington University, and her MA in Humanities at New York University. Kate is currently enrolled in the Master’s program in Biography and Memoir at the CUNY Graduate Center. She aims to explore models of care in communities where the government or dominant power structure has limited or been hostile to their methods. Her current interest is in communities in New York City throughout history who have had to form their own systems to care for one another, specifically exploring models in healthcare and in education. Recent research includes Progressive Era reforms in the field of medicine and public health, looking at the regulations placed upon midwives that curtailed their practice, and the increased fervor for medicalized birth. Her larger goal is to use archives and oral histories to create audio narratives around themes of community care, and that these deeply researched accounts serve as records and evidence of a collective history, available to the public.

Kate Skorpen-Claeson (OHSS Intensive 2012, OHSS Intensive 2021): I am a former staff attorney for the United States Courts in the area of civil rights and habeas corpus. I now live in southern Sweden with my husband of 33 years. I spent most of my childhood and Maine and returned to Maine to raise our three kids. I am in my mid 50s and I straight and middle-class and white. I have been on disability for ten years and, while I enjoy gardening building, my growing library, and reflective writing, I am tremendously tired of being on the sidelines of what is going on “out there.” While I do not find my particular biographical story of much import, I am fascinated by the experiences and perspectives of other people, particularly the people currently ‘in the middle” of our current muddle --those most effected by and engaged with issues of climate break down and our current social, cultural, political and economic dissonance. I seek only to facilitate the process of deep, respectful story sharing towards catalyzing the ‘just’ part of the ecological-economic transition ahead.

Katelyn Hale Wood (shey/they) (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) is an associate professor of Theatre History at the University of Virginia and the author of Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the 20th and 21st Centuries United States. Katelyn's current research focuses on sound and queer archives.

Katheryn Lawson (April Mini-Intensive 2021): Born and raised in Iowa, Katheryn Lawson is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Delaware, studying the intersections of race, pet keeping, animal care, and animal control in urban America. She has previously published on Girl Scout music and bird calls in children’s song collections, while more recent digital essays include “Pet Keeping and Pet Hiding in Black America” (https://ushistoryscene.com/article/pets-black-america/) and “The Little-Known History of Cat Litter” (https://disposableamerica.org/cat-litter/). In past lives, she has studied English, music performance, historical musicology, and library and information science. In addition to serving as the Editorial Assistant at the University of Delaware Press for the 2020–2021 school year, she has been the copy editor for Sloth: A Journal of Emerging Voices in Human-Animal Studies since 2017. She serves on the Graduate Mental Health Committee and helps departments and colleges develop graduate mentoring programs across the University of Delaware.

Katherine Newhouse (Mixed/Memory 2015) is a third year doctoral student at Teachers College at Columbia in the Curriculum and Teaching department. As a former special education teacher, Katherine is interested in disability studies in education as an underlying theoretical framework for inclusive education. While still in the process of completing my course work, she plans to frame her dissertation work using disability studies in education.

Dr. Kathleen Kole de Peralta (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is a clinical assistant professor of global history. Her research integrates the history of medicine and environment on early-modern Iberia and Peru to 1) capture the intrinsic, and historical relationship between environment and health in urban areas; 2) demonstrate the evolution of health as a fluid, changing concept depending on the cultural context within which it was produced; and 3) use the digital humanities and open-access platforms to make enviro-health history accessible to English- and Spanish-speaking audiences.

Kathryn Kent (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022, Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is a professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies looking to do an interdisciplinary project in queer culture and history. She has published in the past on queer literatures. She teaches in both literary and cultural studies, as well as gender and sexuality studies.

Kathy Bailey (OHSS Intensive 2013): I have worked in the nonprofit sector for over 20 years in the areas of housing and adult literacy. I recently spent three years in national service with Literacy AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps VISTA, working with GED and ESL students. I am presently a GED instructor at the Dutchess BOCES Adult Literacy Institute, which means I am basically a teacher of a one-room schoolhouse: helping some students work on their multiplication tables, some write critical essays and others solve problems with the Pythagoreum Theorem . I am focusing on deconstructing and demystifying math topics and developing real-life curriculum for my classes. I lived in Hudson for 3 years and now reside in Poughkeepsie. I am interested in architecture, photography, writing and in the history of the Hudson Valley. I recently met my 2012 goal of crossing the Hudson River 100 times on the Walkway over the Hudson. I documented my trips with over 1000 photos and created a photo book of the experience.

Katie Best-Richmond (Oral History Intensive 2024) is a member of the storytelling team at the H.E. Butt Foundation in San Antonio, Texas. She helps share the stories of neighbors across San Antonio to educate the city on issues of systemic inequality. She spent time at Columbia University and the University of Texas during her college years and graduated with a degree in Latin American Studies. Inspired by her studies and her family’s participation in El Movimiento, her area of interest centers on who gets to tell the stories of her chicanx ancestors and how those stories are taught in Texas schools.

Katie Hammond (Shaking the Family Tree, 2017, Mixed/Memory 2015): I love listening to people tell stories. Thankfully I chose a career that centers around storytelling. Through various social work positions over the past 10 years, I have had the pleasure of interviewing and listening to hundreds of people in a diverse range of settings, from nursing homes to domestic violence shelters to jails. I am in the process of brainstorming a new path and want oral history to play a major role in the form it takes. I look forward to meeting and learning from all of you.

Kaya Weidman (Oral History for Organizations 2021) is a co-founder and Executive Director of Kite’s Nest, a center for liberatory education in Hudson, NY. Kaya began living in Columbia County nearly two decades ago as a land steward and farmer, when she started a collectively-run CSA called Germantown Community Farm on land where she continues to live. After traveling throughout Mexico and the US learning and teaching about radio production and transmission as a tool for organizing and empowerment, she co-founded the local community radio station, WGXC 90.7-FM, Hands-On Radio in 2008. She served as the station's Director of Community Engagement, and chaired the governing council. Growing up, Kaya was supported to make choices about her own educational path, and she’s passionate about supporting young people in having the power to make choices about where and how they learn. A lifelong self-directed learner, Kaya’s favorite moments involve opportunities to share, learn and build with others.

Keith Walpole (November Mini Intensive 2023) is a paralegal and writer. He is currently focused on capturing each New Yorker’s perspective, life experience and story through oral history. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Kelly Giles (OHSS Intensive 2016): I’m a 2nd year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My research interest include: race, class, gender; sexuality; agency/autonomy; organizations/institutions and methodology. My current research examines middle aged (35 to 55 years) Black women and their ideals regarding dating, love, sex and intimacy. More specifically, I’m exploring the impact voice and voiceless has on the construction of Black sexual narratives, particularly as it relates to the Black female body in the US. I received a Bachelor of Business Administration, with a major in Marketing, from Western Michigan University (2002) and from CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique & Interdisciplinary Studies (CUNY BA) Program (2014) with concentrations in Gender and Sociology. Their my research interest focused on the impact that mass media and popular culture has on ideals of self, specifically as it relates to the body and body image, for Black women in the US.

Kelly Jones (OHSS “Talking White” 2022): I’m a freelance audio producer and editor based in Charlottesville, Virginia. I also teach documentary-making for the Race, Religion, and Democracy Lab at UVA. I used to be a philosopher and was studying for a Phd in Canada, but I got lonely after my class work was finished and looked for other ways I could still talk with people about big ideas. So, I started a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast, got some training at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, won a Third Coast Short Doc award for a three-minute piece about poutine, and produced a documentary for the BBC about firearm suicide. And then: I quit grad school. I've been producing radio shows, podcasts, and audio documentaries in the 10 years since. My work usually centers around historical stories, often pulled from archives and oral histories. Someday, I will have the time and space to continue my passion project: a podcast called “Do Over,” about regret and the strange terror of the choices people make.

Kemi Ilesanmi (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) has been a DMV clerk, receptionist, business school dropout, Minnesota State Fair ribbon winner, museum curator, foundation officer, and now Executive Director of The Laundromat Project, a NYC arts nonprofit that advances artists and neighbors as change agents in their own communities. She cares about cultural and community care, #BlackLivesMatter, and all things Beyonce and Michelle Obama. Her work is also deeply informed by her “Halfrican” roots, to which she proudly wears her dual Nigerian and Black American heritage on her sleeve and in her heart.

Kennedi Johnson (November Mini Intensive 2023) is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology with a minor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. Her interests include Black feminism, critical pedagogy, abolition, and sound studies. Her research centers on the ways in which race and gender are perceived sonically in the U.S. More specifically, she looks at how the (mis)hearings of Black girls as sassy, angry, or disrespectful impede their learning in the nation’s school system.

Khonsu X (Shaking the Family Tree 2024) is an experimental audiophile; a classically trained violinist since the age of six, his style of play is intuitive, free-form, and constantly in search of resonant frequencies. his poetry is informed by his experiences as a queer Black man traveling across Turtle Island, always ending up in the mountains. Khonsu is co-steward of Ezili’s Respite Farm & Sanctuary, cultivating perennial & medicinal food sources, and raising heritage breed chickens, guineas, and small ruminants.

Kieran Cannistra (OHSS Intensive 2014) is … where to begin? Kieran Cannistra works in communications at IBM Design. She is based out of Portland, OR, where she lives with her five children and husband. She has previously lived on the Oregon coast, in Western Maryland, in Atlanta, Georgia, all over the place in the Northeast (NY / NH / CT / MA) and for a few years in Tokyo, Japan. She landed in her communications role after a few years in learning design, and (before that) a few years in fundraising. She really, really hated fundraising. A lot. Kieran spends most of her time picking up Lego, scraping what looks like it might have been banana off the floor, and putting coins into the family swear jar. She wishes she spent more time reading and writing for pleasure. She wishes she spent less time looking for missing library books.

Kim Sudderth (OHSS “Talking White” 2022): Currently, I am serving as Practitioner In Residence for the Repair Lab at the University of Virginia. The project, Wading Between Two Titans, is a multi-stage research project focused on assessing the racially disparate impact of climate change and sea-level rise on residents in the Hampton Roads region. Through qualitative and quantitative research utilizing public records, participant observations, social media, surveys, and interviews, the project aims to identify and amplify the perspectives, experiences, concerns, and demands of the region’s most vulnerable and neglected communities. More broadly, it aims to re-center local, state, and federal approaches to addressing the threat of climate change and sea-level rise around those communities that have suffered the greatest environmental harms in the past, and whose experiences and insights offer the most valuable and urgent lessons for understanding and addressing the twin challenges of racial and environmental injustice. I have been working professionally as an organizer for climate justice advocacy in 2016 as an organizer and strategist for a national organization. I successfully brought together women from diverse backgrounds to form teams to take meaningful action for a livable climate for all children across Virginia. My work has focused on outreach, advocacy, leadership development, and long-term strategic planning so that we can protect our families and the places where we and our children live, worship, learn and play. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Sociology with a concentration in Diversity and Inequality as well as a certificate of Leadership, Organizing and Action from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. I also serve on the Planning Commission for the city of Norfolk. "

Kimberly M. Leddy: (Oral History Intensive 2024) As an educator, I work with high school juniors and seniors in a program called Mosaic. If I edited out all the details of every project, the common ground left would be "stories." I believe that it is through stories that we find empathy, compassion, and understanding — all attributes that cannot be on a standardized test but could be the most important skillset my students take with them. I've led a successful oral history project for the seniors a few times, leaning on The Ohio State University's excellent Folklore Studies faculty to give us some guidance. As a teacher, I love that my students were so engaged; as a "person," I found the entire process of oral history meaningful.

I bring the same overstuffed backpack of experiences to the classroom as I bring to the OHSS intensive —ballet dancer to journalist, restaurant server to deli cashier, writer, reader, photographer, traveler, sister, friend … Dig deep in that knapsack you’ll find my professional binder stuffed with certificates relating to fellowships from Columbia University Teacher’s College, the Moth, Union Theological Seminary, diplomas from The Ohio State University, Otterbein College, and Lesley University, and even, close to the end of the lot, a handful of awards from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists.

Kira Thompson (Archive 2013) I am a librarian in a public library in upstate New York, working at least in part in the Local History collection. We have begun some work on creating a digital library from our historic photo collection, and would like to add oral histories to the project to supplement and complement the images. Though we have made some preliminary recordings, there is a great deal more I would like to know about the process.

Kollin Min (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) recently retired as a Senior Program Officer from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Pacific Northwest team, where he led an initiative to reduce family homelessness in the Puget Sound region. Prior to joining the foundation, he served as the Seattle/Washington State Director for Enterprise Community Partners Inc., a national nonprofit housing intermediary. Kollin is an attorney with more than 20 years of experience in the non-profit, governmental, and private sectors. He received his law degree from the University of Washington, a master’s degree in environmental policy from Lund University in Sweden and a B.A.in political science from Yale College.

Kressent Pottenger (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024): I am a columnist for the national labor journal, New Labor Forum's Working Class Voices. I hold an MA labor studies from The Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at CUNY and was awarded the SEIU 925 Research Fellowship by Wayne State University in '12. I am currently working on a research project about 925 and women organizing in the workplace.

Kristin Lin (Oral History & Writing 2019) I'm an editor at The On Being Project, a media and public life initiative based in Minneapolis (best known for our public radio show/podcast On Being, which examines the questions, what does it mean to be human; how do we want to live; and who do we want to be with each other?). I grew up in a Buddhist Taiwanese household in Texas, which I think very much influenced my curiosity about the world and my decision to become a journalist — during college at the University of Chicago, I edited and wrote for a couple of campus publications while pursuing my degree in political science (my studies focused on environmental politics and Asian American history). I'm interested in how oral history methods can deepen the kind of work I'm able to do, both with individuals and communities. Prior to On Being, I worked at UC Berkeley and interned at The Wall Street Journal. When I'm not listening to podcasts or reading, I enjoy cooking for crowds, running, and penning my (mostly defunct) advice column.

Kristina Hodelin (November Mini Intensive 2023): (she/her) I am a Grant Writer and Historian by training. My work analyzes family narratives and migration within the Indian Ocean World and Atlantic Ocean World and examines how our past speaks to our present. Outside of her writing, academic and professional endeavors, she loves to cook and talk all things food and music.

Kristina Samulewski (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023, Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024): I'm an audience editor at The New York Times working across Opinion podcasts like "First Person," "Matter of Opinion" and "The Ezra Klein Show." Before getting my footing in audio, I worked at T Magazine as the assistant to the editor in chief. I've long been captivated by the medium of audio storytelling and the power it has to evoke emotion and change. I'm a first generation college graduate from the University of Vermont where I studied English, sociology and art history. Being a dual citizen — and coming from a family of immigrants — I've always been motivated by diverse stories and perspectives. I spent a summer living in Berlin, Germany where I interviewed Ukrainian refugees about their experience fleeing Ukraine after the Russian invasion. I aim to contribute to work that adds both meaning and understanding to the social fabric of our lives.

Kristina Whipple (OHSS Intensive 2015, C&C 2015) is living her life out of order. She became a mother at the age of 25; earned a BA degree in Applied Behavioral Science at 30; launched a career as a nonprofit program manager and community events organizer at 31; built a house through a low income housing program at the age of 34; co-produced and co-directed a short documentary film at the age of 36, in which she interviewed over three hundred people; and met the love of her life at 37. Now in her 40s, Kristina is circling back to her early fascination with gathering people’s stories. Often in our society we hear under-represented voices through the experience of the exceptional lone voice that breaks through the cacophony. Kristina is fascinated by oral history, especially its ability to capture a body of human experience in both its diversity and similarity, thus creating a context in which those voices are heard. She looks forward to contributing to this body of work.

Kurt Human: (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024): I am a sound maker who works mainly in film. Because I run a sound services company with a partner who happens to be one of my best friends, we were aligned from the get-go on where we would lend our skills: we provide our services and expertise in location sound recording, mixing, sound design and sound consulting projects that seek to give voice to people of colour and speak about issues regarding migration, systemic racism and inequality. As an extension of my sound design work and my deep love for the expressive nature of sound as a material, I make ambient and 4th world music and consider myself a connoisseur of reverb, distortion and incidental sound events. Over the next few years I aim to channel my interest in storytelling and sound into a career making audio documentaries. The road is unclear, but the journey might include a stint doing a masters. I’ve recently become a father and am enjoying this new part of my life enormously. What this has done is given me a new perspective on my personal history in relation to the place I currently live, Switzerland

Kymberlie A. Quong-Charles (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) brings with her over 20 years of experience in social justice, community organizing, and policy work on various issues including incarceration, immigrant justice, health/mental health access, and state budget advocacy. Kymberlie is a member of the 5th cohort of the Culture of Health Leaders (COHL) program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Through COHL, she is working to innovate and improve the tools and resources available to employers in order to create workplace environments where people who have experienced trauma, live with depression and anxiety or other mental health challenges can be whole. Kymberlie is trained as a birth doula and yoga instructor. She also studies and practices a variety of modalities for healing and resilience, including plant medicine, yoga, qigong, and somatics. Kymberlie holds a Master of Science in Social Work, with a graduate portfolio in Women and Gender Studies, from the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas in Austin, and a Bachelor of Arts in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. She is originally from Augusta, Maine.

Lailye Weidman (OHSS Intensive 2019) Lailye Weidman is a choreographer and educator based in Western Massachusetts. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampshire College and a 2018 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Choreography. Her recent projects include Showman, an homage to the resonance of hardcore music; Social Animal Please Tame Me, an ensemble dance theater work investigating consent and consensus; and Dike Dance, a site-specific performance and community dialogue on salt marsh restoration. She worked with the Movement Party from 2013-2016 to collectively produce Fleet Moves, an annual site-based dance festival on Cape Cod for four seasons. She is also a member of Femmelab, a queer research and movement collective. Lailye received her BA in dance from UCLA and an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work has been shown in venues on both coasts, the Midwest, and Europe. She has been an artist-in-residence at APE Ltd Gallery in Northampton, Light Box in Detroit, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance (iLAND) in New York City, Hothouse UCLA, and the SEEDS Festival at Earthdance. She was Associate Editor for several issues of Contact Quarterly and remains a contributing editor.

Larissa Woo (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) I am currently the Director of Special Collections & Records Management at Molloy College, in Rockville Centre, NY. In this role I am responsible for the college archives, art collections and gallery exhibitions, records management program, manuscript collections and rare books. Over the past 10 years I have worked with a few small oral history collections in our archives and have initiated an oral history project conducted by our students with members of our retired or retiring faculty. I have recently been asked to lead a large scale oral history project on our campus to capture aspects of our outgoing administration’s accomplishments over the past 20 years. I am interested in this workshop to develop new skills in managing and executing an oral history project, so that I can guide and teach our small team to be effective on a tight time schedule.

Laura Hoffmann (OHSS Intensive 2017, I Am Sitting In A Room 2017) conducts interviews with visual artists, filmmakers, and composers. For many years she handled Artforum magazine's international reviews, after stints in fiction publishing, theater production, book selling, and photo editing. She holds a post-graduate degree in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne.

Laura McLaws Helms (October Mini Intensive 2021) is a fashion and cultural historian based in New York and London. Specializing in the influence of vintage clothing on contemporary design, Laura acts as an exhibition curator and design consultant to stylists, editors and designers within the film, advertising and fashion industries. Laura curated an exhibition, Thea Porter: 70s Bohemian Chic, at the Fashion & Textile Museum in London (2015), and wrote an accompanying monograph, Thea Porter: Bohemian Chic, published by V & A Publications. She has written for a number of magazines and academic journals, in addition to collaborating with advertising companies and websites on fashion and pop culture-centric articles, talks and events. Laura hosts a podcast, Sighs & Whispers, where she interviews older artists and creatives as they look back over their lives and careers. She was also the co-founder of the arts and fashion publication Lady and the clothing line Marshmallow. Ms. Helms worked towards her PhD at London College of Fashion and holds a Master’s Degree in Fashion History, Theory & Museum Practice from The Fashion Institute of Technology, as well as a BFA from The Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in Photography and Imaging. "

Laura Murray (OHSS Intensive 2015): I teach Cultural Studies and English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. I’m also a musician and a community activist. Kingston is a conservative city known for its nineteenth-century limestone and as the home of Canada’s first prime minister. I however am interested in more recent history, the history of ordinary people and places, labour, immigration, play, the stuff of life. I’m in the early stages of a neighbourhood history project, and wanting to find inspiration and ideas about how to go beyond the staid classic interview – I want to learn about podcast possibilities, mapping and landscape-based interfaces, arts collaborations, and how oral history can contribute to community development without being a tool for gentrification.

Laura Thorne (Experimental Ethnographies 2018, OHSS staff), Laura Thorne is a Brooklyn-based publisher, writer, and artist from the West Coast of Canada. She completed her graduate work in publishing and journalism at The New School and currently works for a graphic design studio called Point Five, which specializes in publication design for non-profit, educational, political, and literary clients. She is a co-publisher and editor for Voices of Lefferts, a community writing and history project based in Flatbush, and is currently launching an oral history archive based on that project. In addition, she works with Science for the People, a radical science magazine that relaunched in 2019, and Oral History Summer School. She previously worked for The New Inquiry and at Verso Books.

Laura Zelasnic (OHSS Intensive 2013, Radio 2014): Born in Scranton, PA. Attended Penn State. Graduated with a BA in Art History. Pursued graduate studies in Material Culture. MLS from Queens College, NYC. Worked as a project archivist for some years. Drawn to sound through its ephemeral, atmospheric qualities. Transitioning from historian to reporter.

Laurel Forest Foglia (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) was born and raised on a small family farm on Long Island, New York. She is currently based in Chicago where she has worked as a writer, editor, and educator. Foglia earned a BA in Literary Arts from Brown University and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lauren Bouton (OHSS Intensive 2014, Radio 2014): I spent my childhood in Upstate NY and my formative years in a college town in the Deep South. After graduating from Auburn University with a degree in Political Science and Spanish I decided it was time to leave the south to seek inspiration and opportunity. Since then, I have worked as an AmeriCorps VISTA, a production assistant for film and photography, a documentary film researcher and transcriber, an archive assistant, and recently have moved to New York City, a life-long goal. As of May 10, 2014, I have managed to narrow down my interests to these: media arts, research, documentary journalism, oral history, archival media, anthropology and sociology, gender and racial equality, mortality and spirituality. My plan for the future involves graduate work in Anthropology and continued study of media arts as a form of self-expression and social change.

Lauren Elizabeth Kelly (Radio 2013, OHSS 2014 Assistant , OHWS Radio Instructor, OHSS 2015 Program Coordinator, Staff): I’m a filmmaker with a background in ballet and post-modern dance interested in experimental practices, cognition, creativity, and humor. I hold an M.A. in Media Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Studies, both from The New School University, and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. I’ve screened at festivals and galleries around New York and last year at backup_Festival Weimar Germany. I’m currently working on two films. One is a short about my Mom and the idea of home. I shot over 8 months after my mom had a stroke and my parents packed up and moved from one home to a new one. The main audio components are a recording two weeks after her stroke as she was working to remember, communicate, and draw a family tree (as a recommended recovery exercise) , and an ongoing oral history as she regains language. My other current project is about my brother-in-law, Emmet, and his work with the alternative justice program Rapid Intervention Community Court in Burlington, VT, that works to get to the root of minor-offenders problems with a focus on addiction, mental illness, and access to treatment. Emmet’s 30 plus years working in the community provide him unique perspectives on addiction, mental illness, poverty, and justice. I am simultaneously excited and slightly anxious about my recent move from Brooklyn, NY to Burlington, VT to dive-in and work on these films!

Lauren Vanzandt-escobar (Shaking the Family Tree 2024): I have a professional background in prison education and am currently completing a research masters degree that focuses on educational practices in non-educational institutions. I am writing a masters thesis on the ethical and political dimensions of prison education. I am also an artist. My art practice brings together drawing and sound, and I have recently been developing collaborative research-creation projects that revolve around archiving transitory spaces and institutions.

Lauren Weinberger (OHSS “Talking White” 2022): I am a New England native, currently Boston, MA-based professional. I hold a degree in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I have worked for the Audio Transcription Center since 2016, and have served as Production Manager of the team there since 2018. I love to visit the beach, discover new podcasts, and host dinner parties.

Leah Esther Simon (Oral History Intensive 2024) is an archival producer based in Brooklyn, New York, who is passionate about connecting small, community archives with independent filmmakers. A cultural anthropologist trained in ethnography by trade, and a current moving image archivist, Leah is in the early stages of directing and producing her first archive-driven documentary informed by oral history and themes of memory. Her research focuses on the topic of collective memory and the Jewish American left. Leah has a Masters in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California Berkeley, and she is eager to continue supporting women, queer, and independent filmmakers as an archival producer in her upcoming projects!

Leanne Tory-Murphy (OHSS Intensive 2015) lives and works in Kingston, NY. For the past three years she has worked as an outreach worker with farmworkers throughout New York State for a regional human rights organization, the Worker Justice Center of New York. She does freelance journalism on issues relating to migrants rights and border politics. She first became interested in Oral History through a joint program between the Duke Center for Documentary Studies and Student Action with Farmworkers in Durham, North Carolina. Through the fellowship she was able to re-establish her ethics in regards to participating in media work and attempt to create a truly collaborative process between documentarian and participant. Through that program and in the years that followed, Leanne recorded many interviews with farmworker women and young Latinas living in Upstate NY. Most recently, she did several interviews with Central American youth who recently migrated to the Hudson Valley, excerpts of which were published in the January issue of the Chronogram magazine. Lastly, in her role as paralegal at the Worker Justice Center, she regularly conducts non-recorded interviews about the living and working conditions of low-wage immigrant workers in the area in the hopes of finding legal remedies that respond to some of the challenges they face.

Lee Gloffke (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) I am a 55 year old male, retired from NYPD, former owner of security company, currently developing a new E-Publishing business geared toward giving first responders a platform for their voices. As part of my new venture, I would like to start a WTC 911 oral history project on my website.

Leigh Davis (OHSS Intensive 2021): I am an interdisciplinary artist interested in exploring the intersection of culture, community, memory, and place. My work is site-specific; I am drawn to contexts that present their own spirituality or sense of community, using this intrinsic human quality to complement the stories I tell through my installations. Trained as a photographer, my work now ranges across media, from sculpture and installation to sound, performance, and video. In recent years, I have been producing a body of work about end-of-life experiences (ELEs)—in particular, how they help us understand the emotional intricacy of grief and the ways in which we construct our beliefs about human consciousness and a possible afterlife. My audio project, Vigil, featured at Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn) in September/October 2020. I have shown work at Open Source Gallery (Brooklyn), BRIC (Brooklyn), EFA Project Space (New York), Oliver Art Center at CCA (Oakland), and MICA (Baltimore). I have also created performances and/or events for the former Morbid Anatomy Museum, Dixon Place and Hunter East Harlem Gallery (New York). I teach courses in the First Year Program at Parsons the New School for Design and live in Washington, DC.

Lena Sradnick (OHSS Intensive 2012) was born and raised New York City and now lives in Brooklyn. She works as a teacher and administrator at Basic Trust Infant Toddler Day Care Center, where she went as a child. She is a graduate of Bard College with a background in French Studies, dance and arts education.

Letticia Cosbert Miller (Oral History for Organizations 2021) is Toronto-based writer, curator and researcher. Cosbert Miller holds a BA and MA in Classics, and her work as a writer and curator is often in dialogue with historical, mythological, or philosophical tropes from the western classical tradition, interrogating its cultural proliferation.

Liam McBain: (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) I am an undergraduate student at NYU studying journalism and working as the General Manager for WNYU, NYU's student run radio station. At WNYU, I've helmed multiple news shows and I DJ for Euphoric, a music show focused on contemporary trans artists. Long live college radio. I have published freelance audio work for outlets like Undark and NBC New York, where I researched, wrote, and edited a six-part investigative podcast on New York City public housing. I live with my partner and our rabbit, Sesame, in Brooklyn.

Lindsay Zafir (October Intensive 2022) is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University, where she is completing a dissertation on HIV/AIDS denialism in the US. She has also published research on the social movements of the New Left, including a digital exhibit featuring oral histories of gay liberation activists in New York City. Lindsay is a former union organizer and currently serves as the editor of The Forge: Organizing Strategy and Practice, an online journal by and for progressive organizers. In that capacity, she is developing a large-scale public oral history project on the community organizing group ACORN with the organization's former national executive director.

Lin Zinser (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) My occupations have always involved asking people questions--from waitress to insurance claims representative, and trial lawyer to director of public relations at a non-profit. I've also been involved in forming community clubs and various kinds of activism. I enjoy talking to people and finding out what ideas motivate them. I'm now working as an independent contractor for the Ayn Rand Archives' Oral History project. I've never been involved in an oral history project before, and am interested in interviewing techniques, equipment, how to develop trust between interviewer and interviewee, best practices for these kinds of projects, and all the other issues I need and want to learn!

Lingling Yang (Oral History & Writing 2019) I’m a grant writer, researcher and producer based in Brooklyn, New York. I’m currently working on a project to incorporate oral history into the philosophy for children curriculum for an education non-profit in Taiwan, as well as several projects that use oral history interviews for memoir, creative nonfiction, and performance work.

Lisa Arrastia (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is Originally from New York City and teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry program at University of Albany, State University of New York. She has an M.Ed. in Administration and Supervision and an M.A. in Education, and she is a candidate for the PhD in American studies from University of Minnesota. Her fields of concentration are critical education studies, youth studies, and critical ethnic and gender studies. Her research examines the intersections of race, gender, and social class, and the crisis of social connection among young people. has worked as a principal, a consultant, and a teacher in independent, public, charter, and international schools. Right now, Lisa is working on building YPA: A Young People's Archive, a site which will launch in July 2016. Recently, Lisa published "love Pedagogy" in the Huffington Post, and she is working on her second book, Everyday Kids, which takes a creative approach to sharing some of the stories featured on YPA. Lisa is the editor with Marvin Hoffman of Starting Up: Critical Lessons from 10 New Schools (Teachers College Press, 2012) ; a consulting editor for the journal Schools; an assistant editor for the journal XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics; an advisory board member of New York University’s PACH (Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity) ; and she was the founder, designer, and lead facilitator for the Teachers Institute @Minneapolis, a fellowship program for practicing grades 5-12 teachers that built a network of critical educators committed to creative, democratic classrooms. In all of her work with schools, Lisa focuses on the development of empathic communities where young people have the freedom to think, question, and innovate as they wrestle with the tangled complexities of self, other, and difference.

Lisa Darms (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) is a writer and archivist. She is the author of The Riot Grrrl Collection (Feminist Press 2013) and co-author of Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz (Semiotext(e) 2018). As Senior Archivist at NYU’s Fales Library from 2009 to 2016 she managed and co-curated the Downtown Collection, and was founder and curator of the Riot Grrrl Collection. She is Executive Director of Hauser & Wirth Institute, a nonprofit devoted to artists' archives.

Lisa J. Maione (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) (she/her/they/them) is a designer, artist and educator. Her creative practice investigates the nature of the screen as a material and as a mode of perception between images, reading and memory. She runs for instance, a design practice, working on collaborative projects in the arts, architecture, publishing and education. Lisa holds an MFA and BFA in Graphic Design from RISD and a post-graduate certificate in Typeface Design from Type@Cooper NYC. She is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Kansas City Art Institute.

Lisa Parra (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is a first generation Mexican-American dance artist based in NYC. Most recently, Lisa was a 2020-2021 New Dance Alliance Satellite Artist Resident, a 2017-2019 Artist in Residence at Movement Research, supported by the Mertz-Gilmore foundation, as well as a 2019 commissioned artist resident at Alkantara in Lisbon, Portugal. In the Spring of 2020 she was invited to teach at UCLA World Arts and Culture Dance department as a Movement Research Exchange artist. Her work has been presented in New York at New Dance Alliance, Movement Research, and Center for Performance Research, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, and the FARM Project in Wellfleet, MA. Internationally, her work has been presented in Portugal, Spain and Mexico. She has received support and residencies from Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY; Center for Arts and Architecture in Guimaraes, Portugal; DeVir CAPAa in Faro, Portugal; Media-Lab Prado in Madrid, and at Bilbao Eszena in Bilbao, Spain. In addition, since 2013, Lisa has an ongoing collaboration with Portuguese media artist Daniel Pinheiro called LAND project. The research project focuses on embodied presence via the internet for developing and performing work from remote locations.

Lise Brenner (C&C 2015): I am a choreographer/performer/writer/producer with a fairly heavy duty day job career in various levels of administration/management both corporate and non-profit. Since about 2002 I have been experimenting in different ways with applying choreographic thinking (i.e. how space/activity/time is organized and how to make that visible) to site specific projects ranging from a dance made for radio with pirate radio Patapoe in Amsterdam to mapping the pay phones in the East Village for Peter Stuyvesant's Ghost, which was a sound art/history/sound walk/environmental event sponsored by a bunch of people including the NY Dept. of Cultural Affairs and the Mondrian Stichting (Netherlands). Most recently I've been developing ideas based on a small project I did last year in Dutch Kills called Find Your Way that was organized around asking people in Dutch Kills to identify the place(s) in the neighborhood that they love and tell me the story of why. I made a treasure hunt for non-residents out of the sites/stories. Currently I am working to develop a collective project with various people mostly based in LIC/Astoria that aims to use collecting local stories about culture: making food, gardening, buildings, where and how people work, music, language--all the things that make up daily life and showcasing the most vivid at a monthly pop-up in various locations along the N and 7 subways lines. We plan to focus on a different 8 block radius each month and to connect with local businesses, civic associations, grassroots organizations, artists, cooks, etc--working as much as possible via word of mouth so that we build community as we collect stories in various mediums (video, dance, music, recipes, art or other objects).

Lisa Hazell (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) brings reflection, creativity and archival research to her craft. Dedication to teamwork in bringing complex subjects and characters into development is her top priority. A third-generation native of New York City, Hazell is an accomplished media and communications professional providing artistic and creative capacity building working with award winning productions for over two decades. She has an exemplary track record for her passionate commitment to media productions illuminating captivating stories with integrity, visual elegance and inspiration. Lisa is currently producing a transmedia storytelling social project through researching her own family history.

Liz Dautzenberg (OHSS Intensive 2019) With over 10 years of experience in de creative industry Liz Dautzenberg (1986, Amsterdam) developed herself as a visual artist, producer, journalist and researcher. Liz works across the fields of documentary film, journalism, visual arts, radio and digital culture. Previous creative projects include the viral sensation of The Garden of Earthly Delights (PvH Film & NTR), the interactive documentary The Metamorphosis of Escher (NTR), the feature film History’s Future, Food Markets: In the Belly of the City (ARTE/ZDF), among many others. In her most recent project she assisted Jeffrey Perkins on his feature documentary George - The Story of George Maciunas and Fluxus. In addition to juggling a variety of ongoing creative projects she is also co-owns a film archive in Amsterdam: Cine Qua Non. Liz holds a degree in both Film Studies (BA) and Audiovisual Journalism (MA) from the University of Amsterdam, with a minor in Architecture and Visual Arts from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. At the New School in New York she received extensive training in documentary filmmaking and experimental film.

Liz OuYang (OHSS Intensive 2015) is starting an artistic blog for Asian/American women with breast cancer to express themselves through stories, poetry, and artwork. She hopes to conduct oral history interviews to document how they dealt with disclosing the news, fears, incidents of humor, and living after diagnosis. This blog is for Asian/American women who want to disclose, but don't know how or are seeking comfort from learning how other Asian/American women deal with these issues. Women contributing to the blog will have the option to disclose their identity or remain anonymous. Liz has been a civil rights attorney for nearly 30 years and teaches at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and New York University's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.

Liz Rose (November Mini Intensive 2023) researches the intersections of trans theory and Black feminist theory in contemporary diasporic writing across the Americas, using translation as a method to illuminate critical, rhizomatic genealogies of trans feminist thought. They are translation research assistant for the Digital Bilingual (Portuguese/English) Edition of Correio de Africa under P.I. Dr. Zita Nunes, as well as the 2023-2024 Graduate Associate at Philadelphia Trans Oral History Project through the Center for Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies. Liz also serves as coordinator of the Gender/Sexuality Reading Group through the English department. Liz’s work is published in numerous places, most recently TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Qui Parle, and Hopscotch Translation.

Liza Yeager (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is an audio documentarian and sound artist. She's interested in polyphonic storytelling, narratives rooted in landscapes, and recordings of regular people and everyday sounds. Liza grew up in Oregon and has a degree in American Studies from Brown University.

Liú (pronounced “lee-oo”; pronouns: they/them) Méi-Zhì Bransfield Chen is a queer, trans non-binary, disabled, mixed-race (Taiwanese/Irish), Abolitionist nerd. Some of their not-so-secret loves include math, musical theater counterpoint duets, women’s basketball, and bodies of water. Their work combines technology, education, and storytelling, striving to thaw trauma, create connection, and empower community members (and themselves). One of their central thematic explorations is regarding the textures and dimensions of silence and absence. Liú currently works as the Oral History Archive Manager at the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago, where oral histories with public housing residents are centered in various programming and exhibits. Their most recent personal project is a pilot episode of the tidal flats, a documentary-collage on asian queer kinship. They hope to continue producing their documentary-collage as a practice in interrogating and expanding typical understandings of Asian diaspora, identity, and kinship, with particular focuses on West Asian and Afro-Asian perspectives, and the locus of islands. Coming from a History and Black Studies background, Liú has dedicated themselves to probing and uplifting the wide spectrum of historic, contemporary, and future potential relationships between Asian and Black communities. Liú is spiritually guided by vanguard coalition activists/scholars including Grace Lee Boggs, Audre Lorde, and Ella Jo Baker. They have often been called a trouble-maker.

LJ Amsterdam (C&C 2015, Project Design Lab 2024) (she/her) is a social movement strategist, trainer, and dancer from NYC. Over the past decade, she has trained over 15,000 people to take action. She is currently a Senior Fellow at Social and Economic Justice Leaders, where she leads the Direct Action Innovation Lab.

Loring McAlpin (Shaking the Family Tree 2019, Project Design Lab 2024) In the late 1980’s, I became an AIDS activist, at the time, a survival tactic rather than a career or aesthetic choice. ACT UP led to my involvement with Gran Fury, an artist collective that worked to broadcast the activist agenda through graphic interventions, using art world money. An art career followed, but morphed into documentary film projects (Herman’s House, How to Survive a Plague, Marmato and Tegwan’s Nest). I have published a limited edition art book with Cuban artist Jose Angel Toirac, 'Parables', and work on the occasional documentary film, as a funder, and occasionally in other capacities. Over 20 years ago, I agreed to become a donor father, and my role in that relationship has been complicated. I am aware of a wide variety of experiences in donor relationships, and am interested in creating an oral history archive to capture the range of that experience, particularly, the issues of attachment, inclusion, and boundaries that define these.

Lorka Scher (Shaking the Family Tree 2024) is a multi-instrumental loop artist, harpist & poet. Drawing from her own post-war experience as the daughter of Soviet refugees, she explores themes of liminal space, fragmentation, belonging and healing in her work. Her music has been described as medicinal, intimate and haunting. As a somatic educator, dancer and artist, Lorka believes music to be an embodied practice of personal and cultural healing. She combines training from her own ancestral tradition, somatic psychology, relational neuroscience and contemplative traditions in her work. Lorka teaches graduate courses in global health, community organizing and psychology at the University of Natural Medicine in Portland, OR and is a recent Fellow of the Witness Institute — an organization inspired by the work of Elie Wiesel and questions of moral transformation. She holds an interdisciplinary degree in the Sociology of Medicine (University of Redlands) and an Ed.M in “Mind, Brain and Education” (Harvard University). To hear her work, you can visit her website www.thespacebetweenbreaths.com, or find her on the internet under the project: Lorka & the Echo Orchestra.

Lucinda Segar (OHSS Intensive 2015): I am a writer, educator, and movement artist. I recently earned my MFA in fiction at Columbia University. I live in Hudson, where I am learning many things: how to write on my own time, how to expand my teaching and movement practices, and how to grow a kitchen garden. I design and teach multidisciplinary workshops for kids at Kite's Nest, I teach after-school boat building at the Hudson Intermediary School, and commute to New York City once a week to teach creative and expository writing at The Fashion Institute of Technology. I am currently working on a collection of short stories.

Luisa Burgos-Thillet (Shaking the Family Tree 2017): I worked for 25 years in Community Action Programs serving families through local and statewide advocacy, as well as direct service. I helped design and implement training for front line family workers to approach their work using a strength based, family driven model. I trained non-profit boards to more effectively and dynamically meet their obligations to their organizations and the communities they served. I served as a volunteer mediator, trained in Restorative Justice, did volunteer work with the Youth Bureau, Head Start and served on many community boards. I have been a lifelong activist in social, gender, environmental and economic justice. I currently serve on the boards of SBK Social Justice Center in Hudson, Holding Our Own, a Feminist Women of Color led organization in Albany. I am part of the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement advocating for the rights and protection of immigrant populations. I began a writing group at the local library that continues to meet after 5 years, I have been involved in community theater as both an actor and director. In all the work I have done both professionally and on a volunteer basis I have seen that everyone has a story to tell and one of the most powerful gifts we can give another is the opportunity to their story. I am adopted and am very interested in an oral history project with other adoptees.

Luisa Conlon (OHWS Family 2015, OHWS Radio 2015) is a media producer based in Los Angeles and New York. She most recently produced Five Star, directed by Keith Miller. Five Star premiered at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Editing in a Narrative Feature and went on to premiere internationally in the Venice Days section of the 71st Venice Film Festival. Luisa also served as Associate Producer on Gillian Robespierre's feature comedy Obvious Child ( A24 Films) , produced by Elisabeth Holm and starring Jenny Slate. She has contributed writing and photographs to a number of publications, including Modern Farmer magazine and Narratively. Luisa is a native New Yorker, a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, and graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

Lulu Wolf (Project Design Lab 2024) is a trans-disciplinary artist based in Berlin. Her artistic practice focuses on various aspects of human and non-human communication and language, including the capabilities, uses and limits of writing and language, collective consciousness, voice, sound, perception, and listening.

Lynette Shum (Song Collecting and Composing 2023) From a background in doing a community oral history project, I eventually came to be the Oral History Advisor at the Alexander Turnbull Library, part of the National Library of New Zealand.

Maddy Macnab (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a graduate student at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, who also dabbles in community radio. Her current academic research is a local oral history project exploring the founding of Peterborough's first and only immigrant settlement organization in the 1970s. Outside of the walls of academia, she is also the producer and co-host of Aging Radically, a live interview show that lifts up the voices of older women working for social change and fosters intergenerational dialogue.

Maddy Russell-Shapiro (I Am Sitting In A Room 2017) focuses in her work on creating and sustaining high-quality programs to increase young adults’ success rates in higher education and their preparation for fulfilling careers, with a particular focus on support for undocumented youth, former foster youth, and first-generation college students. She also chairs the board of Prison University Project, a degree-granting college program inside San Quentin State Prison. All these projects are grounded in the belief that empathy and high-quality education are critical elements for a healthy democracy. Maddy's current exploration of oral history stems from her interest in ways that writing and storytelling can be used to increase understanding between people.

Manola Secaira (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024): I'm Manola, an environmental journalist at CapRadio, the NPR station in Sacramento. I've been telling audio stories here for the last two years, covering topics the impacts of climate change and how communities are responding. Before that, I worked at a PBS affiliate in Seattle where I covered both Indigenous Affairs and environmental justice (topics that frequently overlap with one another, as Tribes play a big role in environmental policy throughout the country). More recently, I've been interested in exploring projects where I create audio stories rooted in the perspectives of people who share my background — specifically, queer communities of color. I want to tell stories where the focus is not constant explaining ourselves to outside audiences; instead, I want to be able to dig in, with nuance and complexity, into our own stories and needs.

Marci Uihlein (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a licensed professional engineer with a graduate degree in architecture. She has worked on building projects for both the private sector and academic institutions while working in San Francisco and Los Angeles. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, teaching classes in building structures for architecture students. Her research areas include the structural engineering profession in both contemporary and historical contexts as well as the field’s relationship to architecture. Through the use of oral history, she is looking to document the voices of structural engineers and their contributions to building design.

Mario J LaMothe (OHSS Intensive 2021): I am an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. I received my doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, with a Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College, and a BA in Theater Arts and French Studies. I am working on my first book manuscript 'Vodou Rich Bodies', which positions contemporary Haitian dance as an especially potent site for restorative performances of blackness that labor to destabilize forms of anti-Haitianism. My research also focuses on the intersections of LGBTQ lives and social equity in Haiti and the Caribbean. I am the co-convener of several body-based and social awareness projects such as Afro-Feminist Performance Routes, Queer Haitian Studies Working Group, and the UnCommoning Pedagogies Collective. I co-edited a Queer Haiti special issue of Women & Performance with Dasha A. Chapman and Erin. My other written work has appeared in e-mesferica, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, the Journal of Haitian Studies, The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, and Duke University Press’ co-edited volume Time Signatures. I am a performance artist and curator, and hope to be an oral historian.

María Islas-López (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) is a cultural and cognitive sociologist (Ph.D. Rutgers University) with experience in community-engaged and participatory methodologies. She has spent over a decade of her career engaging in memory-related work in academic, community and museum settings. Her work has paid particular attention to the connection between remembrance and future thinking, tracing how the cultural construction of the past and the future influences action. A qualitative researcher by training, in her work she has always gravitated towards narrative methodologies and storytelling. Sha has gathered and interpreted testimonies both in Mexico and the United States, in a variety of contexts. Throughout the years, her focus has been on addressing narratives that have intentionally been marginalized, particularly from migrant communities, to meet the needs of communities to tell their own story. Recently, she has focused on inclusive archival efforts that enable opportunities for co-creation, community authorship and reparative descriptive efforts. She has a unique blend of experience as an educator and researcher in higher education and as a consultant and evaluator in non-profit organizations, coupled with hands-on experience working across disciplines and sectors in community-based projects focusing on social wellbeing and cultural engagement, especially with communities that have been impacted by systems of oppression and immigrant families.

María Luisa Martínez (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023): I am an educator from Mexico. After completing a Ph.D. in Hispanic Language and Literature from Boston University, I began teaching Spanish and Latin American literatures and cultures in various colleges in New England. I am interested in developing an oral history project exploring Hispanic-speaking and U.S. Latine youth's experiences of the social issues that affect Generation Z the most.

Marian Bull: (December Mini Intensive 2021) Born and raised in Beverly, Massachusetts, Marian Bull is a nonfiction writer and ceramic artist now based in Brooklyn, NY. Her background is in food writing, and her work has been published in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Vogue, The New Republic, and Bon Appétit. She is currently at work on a book about the stage magic troupe she grew up performing with, a project that relies heavily on oral history. When she is not writing, Marian is in the ceramic studio, making everything from mugs to ceramic replicas of now-banned plastic bags.

Marianne Bullock (she/her) (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) is a Senior Partnership Manager for the East Coast with UpTogether.org. She has over 15 years of experience organizing and implementing programs and policy that support family autonomy and choice. She has worked as a strategic organizer and communicator shaping campaigns and narratives around reproductive justice, mass incarceration, guaranteed income, paid sick days and family leave. Marianne hopes to learn skills during the oral history summer school to document stories and break down harmful narratives around poverty, incarceration, substance use and parenting. She hopes to use these stories to help shift attitudes and policies.

Margaret Funkhouser (Oral History & Writing 2019) Margaret Funkhouser is the Director of Writing, Film & Media Arts at Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, MA. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and a B.A. in Dance and American Studies from Wesleyan University. She has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, an E.E. Ford Award for Exceptional Merit in Teaching, and fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Paris Review, among other journals and anthologies.

Margaret Lawson (Building Your Own Transcription Style Guide 2024): Born and raised in Central Mississippi, Margaret Lawson is a public educator and historian of the South. Deeply inspired by the work of BIPOC and Queer activists of Mississippi and Alabama–both past and present—Margaret’s work has taken many shapes over the years. As a teacher in Tuscaloosa City School System, they worked with educators, organizers, parents, and students to create curriculum for local Black history course. Today, Margaret works as the Director of Programming and Outreach for Invisible Histories, an organization dedicated to preserving Deep South LGBTQ History. Margaret credits these spaces, experiences, and, most importantly, the mentors, comrades, and found family who have created space for them, and many others, to radically reimagine what it means to teach engaging, culturally responsive, and inclusive southern history, and Margaret hopes to share these practices and their core values as a models for educators across the South.

Margot Hammond (Shaking the Family Tree 2017): I am a twice married mother of three daughters, one son and grandmother to six. A retired educator, I started my career as a teaching assistant in a progressive school in Manhattan. During the next 40 years worked in public and independent schools as a teacher, administrator, staff developer and founder of a progressive community based charter school in Newark, New Jersey. Progressive values have guided both my personal and professional life and I am very proud to see those values reflected in the lives of my children and in the work that they do. Writing, quilting, reading and crafting are life long interests and pleasures of mine and now that I am retired I am happy to be spending more and more of my time enjoying these activities.

Maria Luisa Gambale (Oral History & Writing 2019) Maria Luisa Gambale produces non-fiction content in various media. As a filmmaker, she won several awards for her film "Sarabah", about Senegalese rapper-activist Sister Fa, which was broadcast in the U.S. and Europe, and appeared at over 40 festivals worldwide. With roots in cinematography and love for verite camera work and style, she also works as a TV non-fiction director and producer, including for National Geographic, ABC News and Fusion. Maria has reported frequently on women and peacekeeping, and launched a Facebook Live Q&A series with women involved in conflict resolution, in partnership with PassBlue, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and Women’s March Global, among others. She is developing an oral and video archive of stories on the island of St. Martin/Sint Maarten, “SXM Stories”, and is working on projects exploring the legacy and future of Middle Eastern maqams in modern times. She’s based in Brooklyn, and has lived in Rome, Istanbul and Bucharest, with Boston roots.

Maria Santiago (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is an MSLIS student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, concentrating on archives (particularly oral history). She began interviewing people primarily to write narrative nonfiction essays, but believes recorded conversations are worthy too of being memorialized in their own form. In 2015, she spent time traveling through Indonesia conducting dozens of event-focused and life-history interviews. She would like to explore creating podcasts, but is open to other forms of display. She is interested in learning more about the art-science-journalistic-historic endeavor of oral history. Currently, she is an intern for the African American AIDS Oral History Project.

Mariana Sanson (Building Your Own Transcription Style Guide 2024): Mariana Sanson is the Communication Manager at Chicken & Egg Pictures. She tells the story of the organization in social media, digital communications, and design. She joined Chicken & Egg Pictures after finishing an MA in Media Studies at The New School, where she also collaborated with the Documentary Studies program as Teaching Assistant and focused her studies on nonfiction media. Mariana worked for six years at Ambulante Documentary Film Festival, and also collaborated with Morelia International Film Festival. She was a 2022 Documentary Magazine Editorial Fellow. Mariana is a firm believer in the power of documentary as a tool for social change and the creation of collectivity.

Marie Venezia (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016): I read Studs Terkel’s book Working while still in college - as I tried to figure out my own path in the world of work - and can remember falling in love with the stories of each of the individuals he portrayed at the same time as I appreciated the tapestry of their lives collectively. Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by individuals I have met in the many communities in which I have engaged and have worked hard to become a caring and curious listener. In 2014, I attended an Oral History Institute program at Kenyon College, “Catching Stories.” It was during that program that I developed a fascination for the role of film in capturing oral history. Since then I have been working to develop skills in film direction and editing. I see an opportunity that I would like to pursue to develop film “trailers” for oral history compilations in order to encourage and ease access to these stories in the future. Recently I co-directed a film of female survivors of heart and vascular disease.

Marissa Schneiderman (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016, Shaking the Family Tree 2017) is a creative empath who is interested in cultivating community through group processes. Her past experiences of creating - whether it was her music recordings, her pseudo-fictional short stories or facilitating Jungian painting classes- emerge from a standpoint that all people can access their own personal creative channels. She studied literature and has worked in different industries ranging from litigation law to grassroots non-profits to a major Silicon Valley start-up. At the moment, she lives and works in Los Angeles and is currently working on a grant-funded book and audio project about her summer in Poland.

Mark Beauchamp (OHSS Intensive 2012, Archive 2013): I teach history and research methods at a college in Montreal, Canada. Last year, I attended the OHSS intensive course and was inspired to bring oral history into my classroom. Since then, I’ve developed a focused oral history project with Ben Lander (another workshop participant). We introduced over 150 of our students to oral history methodology; they have, in turn, collected over 300 oral histories. These interviews are currently saved on two hard drives that are sitting in our desk drawers. We need help. I’m hoping that this workshop will help me to conceptualize a structure for our archive, while finding a balance between making these interviews widely accessible to the public and ensuring that our narrators’ stories are protected and used ethically.

Mark Menjivar (Experimental Ethnographies 2018, Artist in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023): Mark Menjivar is an artist and Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. His work explores diverse subjects through photography, archives, oral history and objects. Mark received a BA in Social Work from Baylor University and an MFA in Social Practice from Portland State University.

Mark Jaeschke (Fall Mini Intensive 2019, Oral History for Organizations 2021) (BA, DePaul University) is a cultural worker, event coordinator, social media manager, and musician. He has earned a BA in Communication Studies from DePaul University and is finishing an MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He currently is the Project Coordinator and Oral History Coordinator at the National Public Housing Museum. As Oral History Coordinator, he researches stories to record, assists with recording logistics, manages the Museum’s Oral History Archive, and is working to create a more justice-focused way for participants to be involved in the archival process of their stories. Most recently, he curated Listed., an installation created by with South African artist, Malose Malahlela, and Chicago sound artists, Jim Duignan and Jeff Kowalkowski for this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial. The project also includes a radio production, which features select audio from the Museum’s Oral History Archive. Outside of his professional work, he has played in touring bands for the better part of the last decade, performing everywhere from punk house basements to theaters across the United States, Canda, and Europe. Mark lives in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago. He has a cat named Beatrice (AKA Catbea or Slinky), an extensive record collection, and many house plants that probably could use a bit of watering."

Marnie Macgregor (OHSS Intensive 2015) is a recent graduate of Bard College where she majored in cultural anthropology. Having grown up on a farm in Minnesota, Marnie is passionate about issues regarding agriculture, rural communities and the Midwest. Marnie hopes to continue conducting interviews in her local community, collecting stories about the disappearing family farm landscape and how it affects small town viability.

Martha Joseph (Song Collecting and Composing 2023) is a curator and writer specializing in contemporary art, sound, and performance. At the Museum of Modern Art, she is part of the curatorial team for The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, MoMA's space for live and time-based art. There, she has organized exhibitions, commissions, and performances, including Projects: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Yve Laris Cohen: Studio/Theater; Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: May Amnesia Never Kiss Us On the Mouth; Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y fuerza; and David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics Inc.: Rainforest V (variation 1). With Ana Janevski and Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, she co-organized Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done in 2018. Before joining MoMA she worked at The Whitney and The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). She received her Masters degree in the History of Art from Williams College; a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Oberlin College; and a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from Oberlin Conservatory.

Marty Hunt (OHSS Intensive 2018): Second of two daughters, I lived in eight states before ninth grade. I graduated from the University of Maryland in math education and taught seventh, eighth, ninth grade math before trying Camphill living. Now it’s been 45 years in Camphill, and I am a retired house leader/administrator/nurse, now (amateur) archivist living in Camphill Village, Copake NY. Mother of three, grandmother of six, honorary grandmother to two more. I enjoy traveling, astronomy, handwork, crosswords, and learning.

Mary Arnatt (Oral History Intensive 2024) holds an MA and a BA (hons.) in Film, Communications, and Media Studies from the University of Calgary and is a PhD student at York University in Toronto. Her research centers on feminist production and industry studies, women in film, Canadian media cultures, and horror/cult cinema. Mary received the 2018 Gerald Pratley Award from The Film Studies Association of Canada for her paper “’The Set is (Still) Closed!’ Exploring Canadian Production Culture at Cinepix,” and is a recipient of the Graduate Fellowship for Academic Distinction from York University. Mary has served on the executive board for the Calgary Cinematheque, and has worked with Canada Learning Code, LUMA Quarterly, Movies that Matter (now Cinema Politica), and The Calgary Horror Convention.

Mary Maxfield: (November Mini Intensive 2023, Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) (they/ she) I'm a Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's and Gender Studies at Saint Louis University. I teach courses in feminist activism, sexuality studies, and storytelling and social justice, and my research focuses on local LGBTQIA+ history. More specifically, I'm interested in how queer and trans people use arts/ media (e.g. book clubs, choral groups, archival initiatives, etc) to form community. I came to oral history through my research and am looking forward to gaining a stronger foundation in ethical, effective practices. Outside of work, I write fiction and poetry, sing with a local queer/ feminist chorus, and spend an exorbitant amount of time spoiling my two cats.

Mary Ann Johnson (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is president of the Chicago Area Women’s History Council, a non-profit organization founded in 1971 that supports the research, writing, publishing and sharing of women’s history. She is currently director of a major research and public history project titled “Documenting Women’s Activism and Leadership in the Chicago Area, 1945-2000.” She is the former director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she oversaw administration of the museum and development of its educational and interpretive programs. Through the years she has initiated and directed numerous neighborhood, community and public history projects and has been a consultant to radio, television and film productions. She is particularly interested in new media technology and has studied photography and digital filmmaking. She was an associate editor of the award winning Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary published by Indiana University Press in 2001. She is the editor of The Many Faces of Hull-House, The Photographs of Wallace Kirkland, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1989 and co-author of Walking With Women Through Chicago History, Four Self-Guided Tours. In addition, Mary Ann is a social activist and has been involved in numerous feminist and social justice organizations in Chicago.

Mary Ellen Lennon (OHSS Intensive 2014, OHWS Radio 2015): I am an assistant professor of history at Marian University in Indianapolis where I focus on women’s history. Indiana is new (and very different) for me; most of my life I’ve lived in Queens, Brooklyn, Boston and for a year, West Africa. I am interested in learning about the art, theory and practice of oral history to bring it into the classroom as a tool to push my students to engage with the complexities of the world around them.

Mary Ellen Lennon (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is an Assistant professor of history at Marian University in Indianapolis. She was introduced to oral history at Oral History Summer School in Hudson, NY in 2014 and has fallen in love with the field. She has directed a small project collecting the oral histories of a convent of women religious (Catholic nuns) in southern Indiana, making lots of mistakes but appreciating the wonderful, unexpected discoveries that oral history yields. She is very excited to learn more about the practice of oral history, especially in the service of social justice.

Mary Foltz (OHSS Intensive 2019) Mary C. Foltz is an Associate Professor at Lehigh University in the English Department and the Director of the South Side Initiative. Her research and teaching focus upon representations of environmental crisis in contemporary U.S. fiction, queer theory, and literary works by LGBTQ people of the post-45 period. Foltz also has a commitment to public humanities programming as a way to engage with the pressing issues in our local communities and region. She has received grant funding recently for three recent projects that bring community members together to think about how art and literature are resources for working through the challenges that post-industrial communities like Bethlehem face and for imagining as well as building the kind of communities that would enable all of us to thrive. Funding from the Mellon Digital Humanities Initiative allowed Foltz and a team of graduate and undergraduate students to design a website for reportage on the local arts in Bethlehem’s vibrant South Side district. A second grant project allowed her to design and to implement a reading group series through the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown, which invites community members to utilize literary analysis as a means to engage with the multiple forms of oppression that impact diverse LGBTQ people and to imagine action against such oppression. Recently, she received a grant to lead a community-based LGBTQ oral history project for the Lehigh Valley in partnership with the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center; this project will focus on the stories of LGBTQ elders as they reflect upon different waves of activism from gay liberation through AIDS activism and into the fight for marriage equality.

Mary Wesley (Oral History for Educators 2019, Collaborative Narratives: A Storytelling Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) Mary Wesley (Oral History for Educators 2019) Mary studied Anthropology and Philosophy at McGill University, then returned to her native Vermont to work as a field archaeologist for the UVM Consulting Archaeology Program. After falling in love with the New England folk music and dance scene Mary learned to teach and call traditional contra and square dancing (building on the legacy of her grandparents, who were both square dance callers in their hometown of Middlebury, VT). She has taught and performed in schools, community centers, grange halls and at festivals and camps throughout Vermont and across the U.S. and Canada. In 2013 Mary attended the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies to learn radio production and Multimedia Storytelling. In collaboration with the Country Dance and Song Society, she helped conceive and manage The CDSS Story Project, collecting oral histories in traditional dance and music communities around New England. She also produces a podcast for CDSS called "From the Mic" about contra and square dance calling. She has worked with other Vermont non-profit organizations including Young Tradition Vermont and the Wake Up to Dying Project to create opportunities for community education and engagement. Currently Mary is the Director of Education & Media at Vermont Folklife where she produces "Vermont Untapped," a podcast that explores the state through the voices of its own residents. Mary lives in Burlington, VT.

Maryam Hosseinzadeh (November Mini Intensive 2023) organizes walks, collects in/formal stories, creates redevelopment dossiers, and sometimes other kinds of public programs at the intersection of community arts programming, public art, and regional history with a focus on LA and Southern California. She is interested in the layered sites, memories, and places encountered individually and created collectively by all people, everyday, the micro to macro, the links connecting locations, the built environment, and spaces in-between. At the risk of sounding sanguine, she believes in friendliness, collaboration, openness, relationship building, and listening as a practice in opposition to dominant discourses that constrict narratives, futures, and understandings of public places and public histories. Her walks and archive-based projects have been presented with in collaboration with the Armory, CicLAvia, Human Resources, the MAK Center, Museum of Neon Art, Oxy Arts, Pacific Standard Time/Machine Project's Guide to Modern Architecture in LA, and the Women’s Center for Creative Work (now Feminist Center for Creative Work), among others. She holds a BA in American Studies from Pitzer College supplemented by graduate coursework at the University of Southern California where she studied Los Angeles and California’s built environment—and unofficially throughout her lifelong journey as a multiethnic woman raised in the diasporic landscapes of 1980s and 1990s LA.

Matia Emsellem (OHSS Intensive 2017): I am currently living at home and working as a buyer for a vintage clothing shop, but I have consistently had an interest and passion for arts in corrections and criminal justice reform. I identify as a prison abolitionist and have done extensive research on theater and music used as rehabilitation in prison and the prison industrial complex. Especially in these times, I have found an even deeper sense of purpose in committing my body to dismantling systems of power that operate on racist and economic politics. I also studied ethnomusicology in school and make music and video art, so I think a lot about how music and practices of listening can shape culture and class, specifically in America.

Matthew O'Malley (April Mini-Intensive 2021): I am a researcher, ethnographer, educator, and poet. I'm an instructor at Yale University where I am also a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology and American Studies. I am working on an oral history of Buffalo, NY's stark color; which is at once—this project—also a social & cultural geography of Black "East Side" Buffalo. In the past few years, I have been a summer fellow at the New School's Institute for Critical Social Inquiry and a guest-instructor in Aalto University’s University-Wide Art Studies Program. I'm hoping to teach a short seminar this summer on that hard gospel sound; it's tentatively called "Singing In My Soul: The Sound of a Black Radical Tradition."

May Makki (Song Collecting and Composing 2023): I am a curator based in NYC. Currently, I am a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. My personal research focuses on artistic communities that develop alongside practices of music and dance, as well as economies of cultural production.

Meera Nair (OHSS Intensive 2016): I work with India Home, a non-profit that serves immigrant South Asian seniors in Queens, NY and am interested in doing an oral history project with them on their experiences emigrating and growing old in the US. They are part of the first generation of South Asian immigrants who are aging in the US and I think it's important to record their histories in the limited time they have left. There has been very little work done with this group. In my other identity as a writer, I am also interested in developing a project that brings together oral history and creative writing, where the storytellers learn to shape their own stories into creative products.

Megan Bucknum (OHSS Intensive 2017): My vocational background has centered around trying to develop more regionally based food systems, which has allowed me to apply my academic background in urban planning to agriculture and regional development. As part of this work, I have been fortunate to have conducted interviews throughout the country with people involved in all aspects of the food supply chain for use in reports and business feasibility studies. Currently, I am 3/4 faculty at Rowan University as well as an independent consultant and very interested in trying to integrate people's perspectives through stories, rather than just data, into my work and curriculum.

Meghan Mast (she/they) (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) is a radio producer with her masters in journalism from the University of British Colombia and an undergraduate degree in psychology. She is curious about the interior lives of other people––particularly why people do what they do, how they process their experiences and how they navigate difficult situations. She's produced several radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), including a story about a Hutterite woman who runs long distance, a hip hop group from the Canadian prairies, two residential school survivors who are finding healing and two student climate strikers whose ancestors inspire their present day activism.

Melinda Braathen (OHSS Intensive 2012, Doc Film 2013): I am a recent resident of Hudson. Prior to Hudson, I was living abroad in Berlin for 3.5 years, working in the arts and publishing. I currently work at TSL, a non-for-profit arts organization, and have recently joined in on the WGXC Monday Afternoon Show, with Sara Kendall and Noah Reibel. Over the year, I have been focusing on interviewing. Initially, as a freelance contributor to the radio, I interviewed various people, among them, Pavel Khodorkovsky, the son of the former Russian, oil-tycoon, now political prisoner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky; Wyatt Mason, the senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center, on the Chinese contemporary artist and activist, Ai Weiwei; and Robert H. Lieberman, the filmmaker of the recently released documentary “They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain”. Currently on the Monday Afternoon Show, I have co-interviewed several people living within the Hudson-valley region and abroad, as far as Lebanon and Nigeria. During the Oral History workshop, I first and foremost hope to develop my interviewing skills, but also could seriously benefit from becoming more technically sound, with regard to filming and recording, in addition to editing and doing all things post-production related.

Melissa Creary (OHSS Intensive 2013) is a graduate student at Emory University in the “Culture, Science, and History” track within the Graduate Institute of Liberal and a Health Scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, Division of Blood Disorders. In this capacity, she helps coordinate the Public Health Research and Epidemiology in Hemoglobinopathies program and global sickle cell related activities. She will be traveling to Brazil as a Boren Fellow to study the impact of cultural constructions of race on sickle cell disease policy and will be collecting oral and life histories from physicians, patients, and NGO leaders.

Melissa Roberts Weidman (OHWS Family 2015): I'm a musician and writer currently living on Cape Cod, with strong family/friend ties to the Hudson, NY area. For the past decade I have worked as Director of Community Relations and Outreach for a large non-profit serious illness services provider. I am now starting a new project exploring our conditioning by ageism in our culture, and how we can treat each other and ourselves differently around age identity. Both these roles involve collecting stories told by elders across my community. I have also directed a county-wide community dispute resolution program and served as director of communications for a sustainable fisheries organization. My family lived for five years on The Farm, the largest and most enduring commune in the country. I attended Bryn Mawr College and Lesley College, and have facilitated countless community workshops on a wide variety of topics. Throughout all, I have held a deep reverence and astonishment about the power of story to transform pain and loss into wisdom and connection.

Meral Agish (Technical Assistant 2013, Song Collecting and Composing 2023) is the community coordinator of the Queens Memory Project at Queens Public Library. She has worked on oral history-related projects for more than 15 years, and, in her role with Queens Memory, now works with library colleagues to launch local history projects, leads oral history workshops for the public, and collaborates closely with academic and community partners. Born and raised in Queens, New York in an immigrant family, she is now raising a family of her own and finding new things to love about her home borough.

Mercedes Peters (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) (She/Her) is a Mi’kmaw PhD student in History at the University of British Columbia but is currently back in her home territory finishing her dissertation research in Kjipuktuk. She is a band member of Glooscap First Nation and did her MA in History at Dal in 2018. Right now, her PhD research focuses on Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik women’s grassroots activism, organizing, and sovereignty assertion as a central, but often ignored, pillar of what would become known as the Red Power movement. She is interested mainly in how Indigenous nations assert sovereignty through everyday action, and in places where settler states like Canada can’t necessarily see or recognize them doing so. Sheis also passionate about decolonizing learning and education, and most recently authored theGrade 7 and 8 textbook for the Nova Scotia Social Studies curriculum unit on 20th and 21stcentury Indigenous Rights and Advocacy, released in 2021.

Michelle O'Brien (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) Michelle Esther O'Brien is the coordinator of the NYC Trans Oral History Project (NYC TOHP) , hosted through the New York Public Library. NYC TOHP is a collective and a growing online archive of over 125 recorded oral histories with trans-identified New Yorkers. She also coordinates Urban Listeners, a collaborative quarterly convening of socially-engaged and community-based oral historians at the Urban Democracy Lab at New York University. Michelle is completing her dissertation on how class politics shape NYC's LGBTQ movements, and writes on the relationship between queer and trans politics and anti-capitalist struggle.

Mike Lyons: (October Mini Intensive 2021) My work focuses on documenting the stories of men and women serving life without parole and family members and supporters advocating for an abolition of these sentences. About six years ago I began recording the life histories of men and women sentenced to life without parole as juveniles. Many had been in prison for more than 30 years. I also do some media work for the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration, a grassroots group in Philadelphia. I am a professor in the Communication and Media Studies department at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. I am a former reporter with Agence-France Presse and The Associated Press in the former Soviet Union.

Melike-Yücel-Koç (December Mini Intensive 2021) is a faculty in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a Turkish and Ottoman Studies Program faculty. She has been teaching at UW since 2015. Her M.A. is in Applied Linguistics from Portland State University (2011), and her Ph.D. from the School of Education, Seattle Pacific University (2015). She has been working on Oral History since 2017. She is the director of the “Turkey in Seattle Oral History Project” which archives the stories of immigrants from Turkey. The courses she teaches are Oral History, Immigrants and Life in PNW, Gateway to the Near East, The History of Turkey through Music, Elementary Turkish, and Intermediate Turkish. Her research interests include Oral History, Immigrants, Heritage language learners and Language Education. Currently, she has been working on Turkey in Seattle, Oral History of Turkish Americans in the Pacific Northwest Project.

Mia Albano (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) is a first generation Filipino-American born and raised in Northern California. Her father was a migrant worker for seven years in the Northern Marianas Islands before making his way to California where Mia was later born. She grew up hearing stories of migration from her father, relatives, and friends, which inspired Mia to uplift and preserve their voices and histories to better understand the experiences of migrant workers in her community. Mia seeks to understand the personal transformation and effects overseas Filipino workers undergo when working abroad as contracted workers by creating a documentary film that integrates the personal stories of overseas Filipino workers with the Philippines’ unique history of exporting human capital in the form of migrant laborers. She is also creating an oral histories archive with the stories she captures. Mia graduated in May 2023 with a degree in Geography from The University of California, Berkeley. She focuses on global poverty and the cultural, historical, and economic dynamics contributing to uneven international development.

Mike Zryd (OHSS Intensive 2014): I teach film and media studies at York University in Toronto; my graduate training was at New York University. My main areas of research are a) experimental/independent film & video art and b) the history of film study from the 1860s to the present. I’m interested in interviewing artists and teachers from earlier generations to get a sense of the everyday textures and materials and experiences that shaped their art and teaching. I would like to incorporate what I learn in the workshop into my research and also into my teaching.

Miriam Behman (November Mini Intensive 2023) is a photographer and textile artist originally from Calgary, Alberta. She holds a BFA from NSCAD University and is a YSOVA alumni (2016-2017). Now based in Dawson City, Yukon, she splits her time between Dawson City and Ddhäl Ch'èl Cha Nän (Tombstone Territorial Park) where she works as a park interpreter and arts programmer.

Miriam Johnson (Oral History & Writing 2019) Miriam is an artist, writer, photographer & filmmaker who was born in New York and grew up in Tasmania. She is involved in writing, design & art projects and has worked on a range of films including documentaries & educational films, indie low budgets, and the award-winning ‘Black Swan’. Her most recent project was collaborating on an artist monograph and co-producing a documentary about the Australian artist Tony Woods, to be launched in August 2013. She is currently studying in the Journalism, Media and Communications Department at the University of Tasmania, where her research is focusing on the relationship between the songwriter and the song. She divides her time between Tasmania and the USA. She is an alumni of Oral History Summer School 2012.

Miriam Johnson (OHSS Intensive 2012, Doc Film 2013, Radio 2013) is an artist, writer, photographer & filmmaker who was born in New York and grew up in Tasmania. She is involved in writing, design & art projects and has worked on a range of films including documentaries & educational films, indie low budgets, and the award-winning ‘Black Swan’. Her most recent project was collaborating on an artist monograph and co-producing a documentary about the Australian artist Tony Woods, to be launched in August 2013. She is currently studying in the Journalism, Media and Communications Department at the University of Tasmania, where her research is focusing on the relationship between the songwriter and the song. She divides her time between Tasmania and the USA. She is an alumni of Oral History Summer School 2012.

Mischelle Van Brakle (OHSS Intensive 2021) has a wide range of experience in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. She spent almost five years as Assistant Professor and Chair of the Criminology Department at Notre Dame of Maryland University. She co-led a domestic violence awareness program called the Clothesline Project at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women for three years. She also worked as a commissioner for the District Court of Maryland, Howard County, and served as a congressional fellow assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee, working in the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s (D-MA) office. Van Brakle earned a BA in psychology and an MA in English from Shippensburg University. She also holds a juris doctor degree from the Dickinson School of Law of the Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland.

Mollie Goldstrom (Building Your Own Transcription Style Guide 2024): Mollie Goldstrom is an artist, writer, and chef based in Cornwall, UK. Archives and libraries are central to their artistic practice, and they are a committed transcription volunteer for the New York City Trans Oral History Project. Trained as a printmaker, their approach to drawing has been shaped by a dedication to the use of both dip pen and etching needle to make informationally rich works which require slowness and stillness in both their creation and viewing.The tactile scale and intimate anatomy of the commonplace book and illuminated manuscript remain consistent touchstones, alongside comic books, liber herbalis, and concrete poetry. With an interest in the interpretive and exploratory possibilities of cookery, Goldstrom has created interactive meals for audiences in a range of non-traditional settings, inviting collaboration and generosity through the sourcing of ingredients, preparation, and sharing of food— a counterpoint to the isolation of the studio.

Molly M. Pearson (October Intensive 2022, Project Design Lab) is a writer, educator, and organizer based in St. Louis, Missouri. Her work centers sex, identity, aging, illness, community, and the risks we take to survive and make life worth living. Her writing can be found at The New Territory, Catapult, TheBody, Foglifter, and elsewhere, and she is a co-curator for the Changeling Queer Reading Series. She teaches at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, and is a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD) collective, an interdisciplinary community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS crisis. She implores us all to listen to our elders. Instagram: @MollyMPearson

Naomi Navarro-Kelly: (December Mini Intensive 2021) My name is Naomi Navarro-Kelly. I am a graduate student at USC in the criminal justice department. I graduated from CSULB with a BA in Psychology and minor in criminal justice. During my undergrad, I also earned a certificate in basic and applied forensic science and crime analysis through a hands on program that exposed me to different facets of criminal investigation. I am taking this course with the intent to apply this knowledge to researching racial disparities in higher education and learning about the different journeys minority students have when navigating the educational system. Work wise, I am currently working in contracting for a health insurance company. On my free time, I am a caregiver for my grandmother, and I help my mother decorate sugar cookies and pretzels for her side business.

Nancy Kohler (Archive 2013) , Teaching Artist, has resided in Columbia County, NY for the past eighteen years and has found “home”. Nancy recently completed a second Masters in Visual Communication and Sequential Narrative. Her recent body of woven photographs and short stories explores Place, Migration and Identity.

Nancy Ma (OHSS Intensive 2016): My goal is to create spaces that empower participants to explore identity, privilege and healing. I care deeply about connecting diverse people and passions in the community. I live in Los Angeles and I grew up in New York City. I act and write. I am currently developing a multi-lingual one woman show that deals with growing up as a first generation Asian female in America.

Nancy Walters (I Am Sitting In A Room 2017): I thoroughly enjoyed a long career teaching high school English in St. Louis before returning to school to earn an MA in ESL. I was fortunate to enjoy a second career teaching immigrant and international students in community programs, community colleges, colleges, and universities. Eighteen months ago I moved to the Berkshires to be near my children, who live in Boston and New York. Over fifteen years ago, I participated in a summer oral history program at Columbia. Since then, I have been hooked! At present I am involved in an oral history/archive project at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. I am also collaborating with my foster sister, who is writing a book about her experiences with foster care and group homes. Part of the book will be based on her interviews. I hope that the workshop will enable me to assist her with that. A project about an outstanding elementary school that I attended in rural Illinois is also simmering in my mind. I look forward to learning how to use oral history as a basis of writing for not only my own projects but also for my narrators.

Nat DiFrank (Building Your Own Transcription Style Guide 2024) (They/He) is a gender and sexuality educator, LGBT community care worker, writer, and consultant. Nat is a fat, non-binary butch living in Philadelphia, PA. His work focuses on utilizing accessible and comprehensive sexuality and gender education as a form of radical community healing. With over 6 years of teaching experience and a master’s in education in human sexuality studies, Nat creates affirming and intentional spaces that foster growth, introspection, and vulnerability. Nat’s work is trauma informed and healing focused with years of experience working with neurodivergent and disabled folks. They are the co-founder and co-facilitator of the virtual and free social and support group, Transitioning Through Apocalypse, for trans and gender expansive folks 20 and older. Currently Nat focuses their energy on intentional transgender and queer community building.

Natalie Marshall (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) graduated from Bard College in 2015 with a BA in Environmental & Urban Studies and has since traveled the world as a cook, sailor, farmer, boat builder, and artist. She has a strong interest in collaborative communities, documentary storytelling, alternative lifestyles, the way people are affected by their environments, what makes different individuals tick, and group dynamics.

Nathalie Kauz (Oral History for Organizations 2021) is a Project Coordinator on the urban planning team at WXY Studio in NYC and supports school planning projects. Before her time at WXY, she was based in North Carolina working in various capacities with school communities on topics such as outdoor education, student advocacy, parent/caregiver capacity-building, and community engagement.

Natalie Galpern (OHSS Intensive 2019) Natalie Galpern is a vocalist, performer and sound artist from New York City. She’s interested in ethnographic sound, particularly how the human voice is tied to place, memory, and personal history. In 2018 Natalie founded Women in Sound, a growing community of women sharing knowledge and skills in music technology, sound art, and performance. She holds an MMus in Sonic Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Nayantara Sen (OHSS Intensive 2016): I am a woman of color, first-generation Bengali immigrant, social and racial justice activist, writer and trilingual storyteller. I've lived in New York City for the past nine years, and have spent that time working primarily as a racial justice educator, trainer, and curator of social justice programs in the non-profit sector. I am a Senior Trainer with RaceForward.org and BorderCrossers.org. I write and produce curricula about the intersections of race, gender, immigration, sexuality, and storytelling. I am also the Communications Manager at EmcArts.org, a national arts organization that supports the social sector in becoming more adaptive. I'm currently finishing up my graduate degree at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, where I am studying Decolonial and Diasporic Literature, Creative Fiction Writing and Social Change Movements. For my academic research, I am studying the relationships between literature, storytelling and social change movements. And I'm writing short stories, most of which center migrant women protagonists and feature themes of race, feminization, labor, politicization, and imaginary return. My professional background is in political education, leadership development and training, and community organizing for immigrant rights and reproductive justice. My personal interests however are interdisciplinary, and focused on bringing the worlds of art (especially community-based art) , creative writing (fiction and literature) , and activism together. I love reading stories and writing them (my genre is short fiction and poetry). And I love listening to people's memories and stories.

Navi Heer: (December Mini Intensive 2021) Navjot is an architectural designer and urban planner with a passion for centering the voices and leadership of impacted communities, building deep relationships, demystifying urban design, and storytelling. In her current role with Thrivance Group, she focuses on dignity infused community engagement, coalition building, and research for a comprehensive package for spatial reparations through policy. She is the daughter of South Asian immigrants, an abolitionist, and lifelong learner aspiring to build kinship networks and communities of care in Chicago, where she currently lives. Navjot is a core organizer with the Design as Protest Collective, the Defund CPD campaign, and a related constellation of projects working to divest from policing and invest in transformative, life affirming resources. She is currently conceptualizing an oral history project in the dual languages of Panjabi and English that preserves the dreams, aspirations, and liberatory futures imagined by family members before moving to the United States.

Nazia Miah (November Mini Intensive 2023, OHSS Interview Corps Intern 2023 -) is a Programs and Operations Assistant at Kites Nest, a center for liberatory education in Hudson, New York. She's interested in broadening her horizons and trying new things, including learning languages. Miah was born and raised in Queens, New York before moving to Hudson after 5th grade. She loves to be involved in non-profit organizations that help her community and is excited to join Oral History Summer School as part of their Interview Corps in 2024.

Neba Noyan (October Intensive 2022): I am a multidisciplinary researcher and designer, and I live and work in New York City. I was born in a small town in the Black Sea Region of Turkey. I am of paternal Tatar and Turkish, and maternal Albanian and Circassian descent. I desire to research and introduce spiritual methods and folk pieces from my ancestry and upbringing to my creative personal projects. I use the design process to keep my creativity vibrant by connecting to beauty and people around me. I also love collaborating with artisans, artists and makers to create these fashion/art pieces. I use a variety of experiences and narratives as ‘expressions’ of myself to relate to the world that surrounds. Through a creative process, I want to introduce spaces and moments of intimacy to remind people of their own expression and truth. The purest form of my motivation in my work is inspired by my quest: “What is my truth? What is my expression of self that is closest to my truth? What is my daily practice to make this expression free and unburdened in its quest? How can this expression continuously relate to itself and to the world with love, empathy, naïve curiosity and joy?”

Neha Agrawal (Mixed/Memory 2015): I am currently a doctoral student in the clinical psychology program at Yeshiva University. I am from Los Angeles, and just moved to New York for school via Boston. My background is in documentary film, and I used to run an afterschool program for teens at a public access station Cambridge, MA that emphasized storytelling through video. I am really fascinated by how narratives and stories help people heal both from the storyteller's and story listener's perspectives. I hope to integrate my interests in clinical psychology and the documentary arts to foster connection through different mediums.

Nell Baldwin (OHSS Intensive 2014): I am a first year medical student. This summer I’ll be working with a staff physician in the women’s prison here in Rhode Island, doing qualitative groundwork to develop a weight loss and weight maintenance program. Before I started medical school I worked as a health educator on a drug addiction prevention project, using Motivational Interviewing counseling techniques with my patients. I have also worked as an advocacy organizer and I have grown food. I am interested primarily in listening, writing, and wiggling.

Nick Baskerville (December Mini Intensive 2021) tells personal narrative stories that have been featured on shows for The Moth, The Story Collider, and the Armed Service Arts Performance (ASAP) Program to name a few. In 2020, Nick joined the storytelling instructional staff for ASAP. Nick is often a host for ASAP and Better Said Than Done shows both virtually and in-person. In an effort to be an active member of the storytelling community, Nick is fortunate to be apart of storytelling organizations such as Better Said Than Done, Artist Standing Strong Together (ASST), and the Virginia Storytelling Alliance (VASA)To help others in find storytelling shows and storytelling as a whole, Nick started the blog Story Telling On Purpose. There you can find more shows, storytelling workshops and other storytelling insights for storytelling and public speaking for a purpose at www.stop365.blog In addition to performing as a storyteller and host, Nick is also a stand-up comic. He can be found with 3 other comics bringing jokes to folks with no fuss and no cuss at Clean AF Comedy Show on Facebook and YouTube.

Nick Trotta (OHWS Radio 2015) is a dramaturg, director, writer, actor and technician for the theater based in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from Vassar College (B.A. in Drama) , I began to work at a number of theaters in NYC. I have worked with The Naked Angels Theater Company, St. Annes Workshop, The One Year Lease Theater Company, The Flea Theater, Manhattan Theater Club, New Dramatists, The Amoralist Theater Company, The Target Margin Theater Company, and The Brooklyn Emerging Artists in Theater (BEAT) Festival. All the while, I helped to found a theater company with other recent graduates called The Tugboat Collective. We have performed at The Bushwick Star, The Brooklyn Lyceum, Space on White, The Irondale Theater, Theater For the New City, The HERE Center, and The Brick Theater. While I have been working in the theater for the majority of my professional life, I was accepted into the internship program for The Brian Lehrer Show and I discovered a love for the work and storytelling of radio. Since that time I have been working with friends to develop small-scale podcast projects and record dramaturgical interviews for various theater pieces. In my capacity as a dramaturg for the next generation of American theater in the digital age, I'm interested in the intersection of oral history, journalism, and theater.

Nicole Gallagher: (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) I am half Mexican, 100% waitress, a new home owner, scrappy and upstanding student of life, who, 10 years ago, moved from Chicago to Pittsburgh. I have 9 years of being a volunteer labor union organizer under my belt. I consider my militant union years to have been my college, my church, the thing that moved me across the country and taught me to be an adult, a professional, and helped hone the rebel within. I have spent a great part of my life exploring different artist mediums, in an attempt to find my true voice. From painting to performing, I finally started to focus on comedy, because I love to make people laugh and tell stories. In 2019, I was given the chance, through an artist residency with folkLab, to create a one-woman show using my life stories. My show dealt with the sorting out of my existence as a queer Latina who has had to persevere and raise myself out of the echoes of childhood trauma. It was dark, it was funny and it was healing. This show was the breakthrough that helped me finally see that I am truly a story teller and that there is a way to mix the things I love the most: activism, art and identity.

Nicole Galpern (OHSS Intensive 2019) Nicole Galpern is a video producer who has never left New York City for more than three months at a time. In the summer of 2018 she traveled to the Pamirs in Tajikistan and recorded 35 hours with over 70 interviewees for the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA). During the summer of 2019, she will be part of an ELA team documenting the Seke language in Nepal. She is interested in creating an oral history of the public’s transition to the internet.

Nicole LoBue (OHWS Family 2015, Mixed/Memory 2015) ) is a chef, educator and herbalist. She is culinary arts director of the Alimentary Kitchen and is Co-Director and programming director of Kite’s Nest, a learning resource center dedicated to curiosity, inquiry and social justice in Hudson, NY. She is committed to creating an extraordinary environment for children and teenagers to learn, play, and grow. She facilitates workshops and experiences that spark the interests and passions of young people, and offer a supportive environment for children and teenagers to pursue and develop their interests within their community, while exploring the intersection between art, science, creative writing, fiber arts, and culinary arts.

Nicole Turner's (OHSS Intensive 2021) work focuses on the intersections between black religious and political life in the nineteenth-century United States with a focus on the constructions of race and gender, and she also uses mapping to explore core themes of space, place, movement and belonging in African American religious and political life. Her first book, Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Post-Emancipation Virginia, narrates the transformation in black religious political strategies that occurred from 1865 to 1890 and uses election data, church and convention minutes, and archival collections to depict the forces that transformed black religious institutions from examples of black political acumen to sites of political organizing. She earned her Ph.D. in History with certificates in Africana Studies and College Level Teaching from the University of Pennsylvania, M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, and B.A. from Haverford College.

Nicolette Lodico (OHSS Intensive 2019) Nicki is an information manager who helps organizations establish practices to increase transparency, preserve institutional memory, and contribute to historical scholarship and public discourse. Currently, Nicki is the director of records, archives, and knowledge management at the Ford Foundation in New York City. She also is vice president of the Technology Affinity Group, a non-profit membership organization that promotes the power of technology to advance philanthropy. Previously, she worked at the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, a California agency that provides legal representation for indigent men and women under sentence death in California. There, she lead the digitization tens of thousands of historical case documents and the development of a complex application for case tracking and analysis. Prior to that, she developed complex knowledge bases, information catalogs, and intelligence systems for organizations in the private sector. Nicki is passionate about minimizing barriers to sharing and finding information and to analyzing information to reveal new insights. Her current interests include tools and approaches to data visualization and digital curation, as well as specific techniques for text encoding and analysis. She holds a B.A in Economics from Canisius College and an M.L.S. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Nikki Yeboah (OHSS Intensive 2017) is an Assistant Professor at San Jose State University in the Communication Studies Department, specializing in the area of Performance Studies. As an oral history performance scholar and artist, her research brings together creative oral history methods to create alternative records of black life through staged performance. Her work, which has been staged at venues such as Links Hall, the Chicago Cultural Center, and Northwestern University, interrogates questions of social justice, race, and migration within black communities.

Noah Schoen

Noor Al-Samarrai: (Project Design Lab 2024) am an Iraqi poet, radio person, and wearer of many hats. Born and raised in California, my work considers the confluence between place and memory. My first book, EL CERRITO (Inside the Castle, 2018) was recognized by the Arab American Book Awards and named "about the best piece of literature I have read in a long time," by late filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas. I am currently working on an oral history-based poetry collection documenting the emotional cartography of mid-20th century Baghdad.

Nora Saks (October Intensive 2022) is a journalist who lives in Portland, Maine, the little city by the sea. She is currently a podcast producer at WBUR, where she helps develop and make shows on everything from climate change to children's folktales. Before WBUR, she was a reporter for Montana Public Radio, where she created an award-winning non-fiction podcast about the copper mining boom and environmental bust in "The Richest Hill on Earth" - Butte, MT. Trained in the art and craft of producing news and narrative stories for public radio, these days Nora is interested in exploring slower, more compassionate, more collaborative kinds of audio documentary and oral history work where the people at the center of the stories and experiences have the power to shape them.

Nora Segar (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a palliative care and primary care physician. She recently moved to Chicago to complete her palliative care fellowship. In her work taking care of patients with serious illness, she finds her role is often that of listener: a sounding board for patient’s reflections on their lives. She is drawn to patient’s stories and experiences living with chronic illness. She has always been interested in narrative medicine and has had the to opportunity to participate and organize writer’s workshops for physicians. These workshops endeavor to enhance practitioners’ powers of observation, increase empathy and reflect on the experience of practicing medicine through learning the craft of writing. She is interested in how illness narratives shape the way patients make decisions as well as how practitioners view their work. Additionally, Nora believes patient’s stories can be powerful agents for change, both because they highlight frustration and injustices in the healthcare system, and because they act as reminders for physicians to reflect more deeply on their patient’s lived experience.

Noreen Shanahan (OHSS Intensive 2012): I run a small oral history/biography/memoir business called “Rampant with Memory,” where I help people establish an archive of their lives and stories. Although it has been traditionally in print, I’m now moving into creating podcasts. I’m a freelance journalist and publish feature obituary essays in the Globe & Mail, Canada’s National newspaper. I also publish in a range of alternative publications, mostly Canadian, covering issues on the left. I work part time at Our Times Magazine, an independent Canadian labour magazine. I’m a creative non-fiction essay writer and have published fairly widely as such. I’m also completing a poetry manuscript, for which I recently received an arts council grant from the Ontario government.

Nova Seals (OHSS Intensive 2017) is the director of library services and archives at St. George's School. Nova specializes in research and information literacy instruction and archives management. She believes that every encounter with knowledge is an opportunity for growth. She is passionate about learning and her research interests are knowledge acquisition; social epistemology, and aesthetics. Nova holds a bachelor’s degree in government from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, a master’s degree in American and New England studies from the University of Southern Maine, a master’s degree in library science from Simmons College and is a Ph.D. candidate in humanities at Salve Regina University.

Olive Carrollhach (OHSS Intensive 2017): I am currently running an oral history project on Tivoli, NY. For this project, I am organizing community meetings and conducting individual oral history interviews with a number of senior residents in the town. As a (currently!) unpaid project, I produce and host a broadcast show called Echo, which is a monthly, hour-long show on Robinhood radio. My past audio experience includes working as a production intern for the podcast In Theory for two seasons, conducting interviews with visiting lecturers at Bard College, and recording for BardCorps, the Bard Oral History Project. I have experience in broadcast radio and podcasting. I am adept at everything from recording interviews, to writing stories, to editing and production. I am passionate about using radio as a way of creating personal connections in unlikely places.

Ollie Emmes Schwartz (Oral History Intensive 2024) is a trans, disabled, white, Ashkenazi Jewish libra. Ollie was born a third generation Lower East Sider, and currently lives with the quiet and the queers in the rural hilltowns of Western, Massachusetts on unceded Nipmuk and Pocumtuck lands. Ollie's work lives in the lineage of cultural workers and movement chaplains and those who exist to mend broken chains in our traditions. Ollie’s current work is as the founder of Pushcart Judaica a project that uplifts Jews on the fringes for the sake of supporting spiritual practice that reflects liberatory values, handcrafted beauty, and queer brilliance. When they are not running Pushcart they are learning to identify bird calls, dipping candles, avidly reading, and trying to move more slowly through our ever-accelerating world.

Pallavi Podapati (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) is a PhD candidate in the History of Science program at Princeton. She is interested in the history of medicine, technology, disability and the body. Her dissertation is on the history of adaptive sporting practices and technologies in the Paralympic Games.

Paula Cuellar Cuellar (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) is a CFD Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. Her doctorate from the University of Minnesota is in history major and human rights minor. Specifically, she focuses on modern and contemporary history of Latin America, as well as in violence perpetrated in the region during the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition, she holds a Law degree from the Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas,” an LL.M. in International Human Rights from the University of Notre Dame, an Ms.C. in Human Rights and Peace Studies from the University of El Salvador, and a postgraduate diploma in Human Rights and Democratization Processes from the University of Chile. Her dissertation is on sexual violations committed by the security forces and the insurgency against women and girls during the Salvadoran armed conflict.

Paula Smith (OHSS Intensive 2014): I am Associate Librarian at Penn State Abington in Abington, Pa. During my sabbatical I began an oral history and digital storytelling project without any real oral history experience. The project entailed research on African-American visual artists with the intent to develop a digital representation of their lives, work and experience. The purpose of the project was to provide historical documentation about artists who are little known outside of their immediate art communities and network, with the initial interviews focused on the Mid-Atlantic region, emphasizing African American artists practicing during the period of the Black Arts Movement (est. 1965 – 1975). My research interests are all over the place including the following areas: the effects of globalization on education and information access, international librarianship and cultural competencies. I have published in areas of general librarianship, diversity, cultural competencies, and academic outreach. My work experience includes international work in South Africa, Bangladesh, Bermuda, and Uganda. Prior to becoming a librarian I was an information technologist for Fortune 500 companies providing services in project management, and systems analysis and design.

Pema Tashi (they/she) (Oral History Intensive 2024) is a relatively recent graduate from Dickinson College, where they studied US histories of racialization, pop-culture, and post-colonial theory under the American Studies department. Most recently, they have received training through Emory University’s Social Emotional and Ethical Learning Curriculum and The Embodiment Institute Basics Course with Prentis Hemphill. Pema is inspired by intergenerational spaces of leisure and the framework of healing justice. Currently, they serve as the web editorial assistant at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Peter Alter (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) has worked at the Chicago History Museum for over sixteen years in various capacities. He's currently the Museum's historian and director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History.

Peter Anderson (Shaking the Family Tree 2024): I'm an author and semi-retired technical writer. I've always been interested in the stories of previous generations of my family, and have done formal and informal recordings of many of these stories. I have connections in Seattle's large retirement community, and now that I'm nearing retirement I'm starting a business doing both audio and video recordings of stories for other families as well. I've also been invited by people with illnesses or in hospice to come and record their stories and reflections to share with their families, which is an incredible honor. I consider it a privilege to present these families with something beautiful and I'm quite passionate about this work.

Peter Borg (November Mini Intensive 2023): I believe history is a very bright light. When we let shine on us and our reality, we can be confident in where we are headed because it reveals to us where we are, how we got here, and how to move forward. I am a historian of race relations in United States history. My research areas include religious institutions, the healthcare industry, and residential real estate. I currently teach at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Additionally, I am starting my own business that uses history to illuminate implicit bias in a variety of professional contexts.

Phil Grant (OHSS Intensive 2013): I first became acquainted with the Oral History project when I was working in Manhattan at the Grand Central Station Post Office. Since I commuted on the Metro-North I noticed the booths when they were first set up. I gathered up the information and really didn’t think about it again until last year when the Oral History Summer Workshops launched. I had taken several classes on interviewing skills, and techniques while attending the New School of Radio & Television Arts, but those classes were geared toward the Radio and Television Industry. I was more interested in documentary style interviews. I am interested in telling stories about people, their lives , and their history. As the WGXC morning show host I conduct interviews regularly. We have a regular feature on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, where I interview a journalist on the local news of the week, an Education blogger on school, and Board of Education issues, and a sports enthusiast on local, regional, and professional sports. Additionally, I also conduct interviews with local community, and organization leaders on current and upcoming events. I still find the latter very stimulating, as often times when interviewing people who head organizations you find them very passionate and dedicated to their causes. It usually results in a very informative and interesting interview.

Philip Berezney (Song Collecting and Composing 2023, Project Design Lab 2024) (they/she/he) is an artist-educator with a creative background spanning visual arts, experimental performance, and poetry. Their creative work often reflects a focus on queer/genderqueer expressions of the body—and incorporates materials and approaches from multiple artforms. As an educator, Philip seeks to learn, teach, and build relationships in communities that embrace artmaking in all forms as a powerful tool for cultural expression and social justice. Philip’s current work on the Songful Stories Project aims to amplify and activate oral histories from LGBTQ+ elders through intergenerational art and story-sharing workshops for children, teens, and families.

Phoebe Lett (Oral History Intensive 2024) is a writer, performer and audio maker. She helped found the audio department of New York Times Opinion, where she currently serves as a senior audio producer. She has piloted and launched several chat and interview shows, and loves to get creative in narrative storytelling production for Opinion. Interviewing people -- making them comfortable and excited to share their point of view -- is her favorite part of being a producer. In addition to her audio work, she has written countless podcast recommendations and reported pieces on the podcast industry for the paper. Phoebe manages the NYT Podcast Club Facebook group which she helped create in 2017, because her sincere-if-corny bliss is helping audiences find a new piece of audio that moves them. She spends her time reading, writing, listening to podcasts and audiobooks, playing D&D and taking her dog Buster on hikes.

Polly Dewhirst (OHSS Intensive 2018): I’ve been working in the field of human rights, trauma and transitional justice since I got my first job (my dream job) working at an NGO called CSVR supporting South Africa’s historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I am passionate about working with families of the disappeared, former political prisoners, and other survivors of human rights violations to document their stories, and advocate for truth, justice, and reparation. Since 2012 I’ve made Rangoon my home, and look forward to using oral history to collect and share some of the hidden histories of Burma.

Priya Kandaswamy (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) teaches women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at San Diego State University. Bringing together insights from queer studies, feminist studies, and ethnic studies, her scholarly work is engaged with and deeply indebted to historical and contemporary movements for welfare rights, domestic workers’ rights, reproductive justice, prison abolition, and liberatory education. She is the author of Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform (Duke University Press, 2021). In her future research, she is excited to explore the ways that oral history can make visible stories that are often erased by state archives and the ways that collective storytelling can be an important tool for social transformation. In her free time, she loves learning about and spending time with plants, hanging out at the beach, doing yoga, cooking, crafting, and getting to know new people.

Quentin Gibeau (December Mini Intensive 2021) is an artist, musician, writer, and curator from Bellevue, Kentucky. Currently living in Baltimore MD, Quentin has worked in art education, the art world, and their overlapping areas for 10 years. My work attempts to use storytelling in various forms as a way to discover shared humanity. Whether it's in commiseration in our common existence, illumination of culture and experience in new contexts, or in investigation of the ways that utopia can exist between us and among us.

Rachel Dolan (Mixed/Memory 2015): I am a Social Worker currently working at a long term care facility. I have been working in long term care for 17 years and have worked with individuals with dementia ongoing. Prior to getting my Masters degree in Social Work, I was an Activity Director and I continue to maintain that certification as well. The elderly are my favorite population and my residents with dementia are my favorite from that group. I plan to use what I learn at the workshop in my everyday interactions with the residents at my facility and may incorporate that knowledge with other practices.

Rachel Garbus (OHSS Intensive 2021) is a writer, editor, and audio storytelling creator based in Atlanta, Georgia. She muses on queer culture, history and politics, and also writes satire, interviews artists, reviews films, and is a frequent podcast guest. She has created oral history audio projects with communities in Southwest Atlanta, Coney Island, and Bed-Stuy, New York, and is currently working on an oral history of the women’s health collective and book series, Our Bodies, Ourselves. She performs live storytelling in Atlanta, and writes for Wussy Mag, a queer culture magazine, as well as other publications. With a background in law and policy, as well as theater and community art, Rachel is driven by questions of power, story, and voice: whose stories get told, and whose are ignored? In her writing and storytelling work, Rachel seeks to upend these narratives, telling stories that are too often forgotten, and uplifting voices that are frequently silenced. She lives in Georgia with her partner, a primatologist at Emory University, and her dog, who is professionally anxious. Together, they love to hike, swim, read books, and eat extremely good cheese on their very small patio.

Rachel King (Shaking the Family Tree 2019) I am a journalist, editor, librarian and former lexicographer. My writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, Longreads, and many other publications. I have a master's in journalism from Columbia University and one in archives from SUNY-Albany. I have some radio experience, having taken the one-week Transom Traveling Workshop, a six-week online podcasting class from the Center for Documentary Studies, as well as shorter workshops at UnionDocs and BRIC Media in Brooklyn (which is where I live).

Ragnar Olafsson (November Mini Intensive 2023): Born and raised in Iceland, I moved to the United States twenty-one years ago to study biomedical engineering. Since graduating I have worked in academia and in medical device startups in Southern California. I have always had an interest in history and lately, I have discovered that I find myself drawn to oral history accounts, podcasts, and biographies. It has sparked an interest in me to contribute to the historical archives through this unique medium. My main history interest now is Cold War history. I am specifically interested in the Icelandic history of that period. I am also very interested in the history of my local neighborhood in San Diego and the history of Southern California. I am a complete novice when it comes to oral history, and I can’t wait to learn more about it.

Rahel Losier: (October Mini Intensive 2021) I am a second year PhD student at UBCO in Canada, BC. I am strongly interested in ties of solidarity between socialist/national liberation movements in the 1950s until now between regions in the Global South that were part of the Non-Aligned Movement. I am excited by artistic approaches to telling historical narratives such as comics and graphic novels. I look forward to conducting oral history projects with various communities and trying to turn some of those stories into graphic narratives.

Raja'Nee Redmond (Shaking the Family Tree 2024) is a memory worker, oral historian, and artist who is dedicated to documenting and archiving Black stories for future ancestors to learn from. Prior to her work in education non-profits, Raja'Nee was a social science educator in Chicago Public Schools teaching and advocating on the South and West sides of the city. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and African and Black Diaspora Studies from DePaul University and a Master's in Teaching from The University of Chicago's Urban Teacher Education Program, both with the highest honors. In 2022, Raja’Nee was selected as an Earthseed Black Family Archive Project Fellow. Raja'Nee's love of history manifests as a commitment to cultural preservation and continued interest in capturing the life stories of her own family. Today, she serves as the Community Engagement Manager and Digital Archivist at Vocal Justice helping to amplify the voices of young people across the country. She is also the Director of the Scholarship Program at Delacreme Scholars which has awarded over 25 unrestricted scholarships to students and artists from the Chicagoland area.

Rachel Meirs: (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) I am an artist and musician, I think a lot about food, public health, and labor, and I currently work on a dairy farm.

Rachel Smith (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022, Project Design Lab 2024): I'm a content designer, researcher, and editor focused on civic design, repair, and deep listening. Currently, I stay busy writing and editing words for a non-profit design studio that partners with governments to make public services more accessible; offering resources and job support for people pursuing interdisciplinary creative pathways through my free weekly newsletter, Words of Mouth; teaching people how to mend; and pursuing an ever-expanding, oral history-informed multimedia project exploring the varied experience of twinship.

Rama Murali (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) serves as Learning Officer in the Office of Strategy and Learning at the Ford Foundation. In this role she facilitates and supports cross-programmatic learning at Ford in the U.S. and regional offices. This includes the curation and development of diverse learning events and supporting the development of systems and processes that enable greater learning and reflection. Prior to Ford, Rama was Program Director for a Moore Foundation grant supporting a collaboration across three leading serious illness care organizations to scale up communication skills training and system implementation in the United States. Prior to that, Rama was the Associate Director of Global Learning and Training at Partners in Health (PIH). In 2012 she founded Care Cubed, the first grassroots organization supporting Family Caregivers in India. Rama has also held positions with the International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH) India, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Glasswing International, and the Population Council. Rama holds a master’s degree in public health from Harvard School of Public Health and a master’s degree in psychology from the University of British Columbia. She is a native New Yorker who returned to the city last year.

Raquel Garcia (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is a graduate student at the University of North Texas pursuing a degree in Archival Studies and Imaging Technology. As a child, Raquel thoughtfully listened to her mother’s stories about her home country, and attributes these stories as a foundation of her identity. Raquel views storytelling as an important tool for reflection and social development, and hopes to provide safe spaces for these stories to be shared through archival activation. Raquel is passionate about using inclusive methods of description and representation to ensure the survival of stories, and prevent the erasure of community history and identity. Raquel currently works with the Texas After Violence Project as a community archivist.

Rebecca Amato (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) is a historian whose research and writing focus on the intersections between cities, space, place, and memory, with a special focus on mobilizing the public humanities for social justice advocacy. Her work has appeared in Urban Omnibus, Radical History Review, City Courant, and New York magazine, as well as exhibits throughout the city. She has been a staff member and consultant at a variety of history institutions in New York, including the Brooklyn Historical Society, the American Social History Project, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York. She holds a PhD in United States History from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is currently the Associate Director of the Urban Democracy Lab at New York University.

Rebecca R. Borrer (October Mini Intensive 2021) is an artist, musician, animator, political candidate, and educator located in Hudson, NY. She is devoted to modes of sharing where information is freely distributed and value is defined by proliferation of ideas rather than individual profit.

Rebecca Carmel (OHSS Intensive 2018, Oral History & Writing 2019, Song Collecting and Composing 2023) is an artist, facilitator, and caregiver whose work has included early childhood care, end of life care, doula support, death discussion groups, trauma support groups, and changing many, many diapers. She makes art, writes, cooks, sings, laughs, cries, and lays on the floor in her home in Brooklyn, which she shares with her two beautiful cats. She was born & raised in New York City.

Rebecca Wertheimer (April Mini-Intensive 2021): I have always loved talking to people and hearing stories about their lives. I have spent hours honing the skills of listening, asking questions, and helping people feel comfortable sharing. As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker for over a decade, I have served individuals, families, and institutions in the areas of mental health, wellness, conflict resolution and community engagement. In the fall of 2019, feeling tired and needing a change, my husband reminded me that I love stories of people’s lives. He suggested that I start a business where I interview people about their life stories. Beyond the story, how do you share it with those you love? How do you tell the people you love what you admire and appreciate about them right now? How can you preserve family stories, lore and funny tales? In 2015 my father died of cancer. My family put on a beautiful memorial service for him full of stories about his life, career, family and friendship. It was sweet, and funny and full of love and I wish he had been there to hear it all. Let me capture your story so you can share it with those you love and nothing is left unsaid.

Rebekah Aronson (Shaking the Family Tree 2017): The youngest of seven in a divided family, I have always been keenly aware that everyone has their own version of events. Inevitably attracted storytelling, I studied literature, creative writing and cultural anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College. It was, however, my experience as a television producer in NYC that taught me that real life, real people, are far more nuanced and emotionally compelling than anything I could ever imagine.

Régine Romain (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) Régine Romain is a Haitian-American artist, educator, visual anthropologist and dynamic storyteller. From 2016 to 2018, Régine lived in Benin, West Africa, conducting research, teaching, completing her ""Brooklyn to Benin: A Vodou Pilgrimage"" mixed-media project and directing/producing three short films. While in West Africa, she created the WaWaWa Diaspora Centre - to actively heal historic wounds and trauma related to the TransAtlantic Slave Trade through inter-generational arts, education, and exchange programs. Régine has 20+ years of experience teaching, training, and supporting diverse populations as a consultant with clients that include – New York University, NYC Department of Education, Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is s a 2018 Hemispheric New York EmergeNYC Fellow and is a BRIC 2018 Brooklyn Free Speech Podcast Fellow, with a new podcast entitled ""Vodou Roots: A Love Story Musical available via iTunes and SoundCloud. Her photographic appears in MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora (2017) and her work was included in the MFON’s exhibition of Altar: Prayer, Ritual, Offerings at Photoville (2018).

Renay Egami (OHSS Intensive 2015, C&C 2015, Project Design Lab 2024, Shaking the Family Tree 2024): Originally from Vancouver BC, Renay Egami is a visual artist based in the Okanagan region on the traditional and unceded territory of the Syilx Peoples. As a third generation person of Japanese parentage and Canadian by birth, the experience of communication between generations has been one of translation, repetition, bridging gaps between languages through the invention of new vocabularies, and performing rituals. Her artistic research is currently focused on everyday objects as sites of resistance and material explorations in porcelain, textile-based processes, book arts, and photography. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (NY) in Maine. Renay is also an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan where she teaches in the Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies.

Rhan Small Ernst (Radio 2013): I am an artist that works in music, sound and video. My love of these mediums comes from a life long obsession with listening to recordings and watching films. My father gave me an early and rich education in film and music. He always had portable consumer recording devices around the house when I was growing up. I used these devices to make “soundtracks” for comic books. In high school, I sang in rock bands. In my early twenties, I started making experimental music using tape recorders and home made instruments. I went to a technical school to learn recording engineering. From there I moved to Los Angeles to work in post production. I was ill suited for the Hollywood factory and quickly left the business and began producing my own work.

Rhondda Robinson Thomas (Oral History & Writing 2019) I teach early African American and American Literature at Clemson University where I am the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature. My work includes courses and research in racial and cultural identity development. During the past nearly twelve years for my Call My Name project, I have been recovering and sharing the stories of Black people in Clemson history, including enslaved persons who lived and labored on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation on which the University was built, sharecroppers—freedmen and women—who worked on Fort Hill during Reconstruction, convict laborers whom Clemson trustees leased from the state of South Carolina to help build the institution at the turn of the 20th century, wage workers and musicians who were hired to work at the institution during the Jim Crow era, and the students, faculty, and staff who came to Clemson after desegregation in 1963. I’ve also engaged with local Black residents to record and tell their stories, including narratives about their families and communities. More details about my project can be found here: www.callmyname.org. Additionally, I’m a family historian who has been researching and documenting my extended family’s ancestry and experiences for many years.

Richard Max Gavrich (Shaking the Family Tree 2017) is a photographer and educator currently based between New Orleans and upstate New York. He is a recent graduate of Bard College, where his senior thesis presented a photographic and audio-visual document of strangers met traveling across the eastern United States. Gavrich was the 2014 recipient of the Lugo Land artist residency in Emilia-Romagna. His first monograph, Estraneo, was published in 2015 by Edizioni del Bradipo. He has exhibited at the Museo San Rocco, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Rayko Gallery San Francisco, and lectured at Big Class New Orleans and Bard College. He is interested in the intersectionality of place, personal narrative, and collective identity.

Robyn Fishman (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) My name is Robyn Fishman. I am a graduate student in the Public History Program at UCSB and a full-time faculty member at Glendale Community College. I am eager to learn about this material and to find peers to build relationships with.

Robin Nagle (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) As anthropologist-in-residence with New York City's Department of Sanitation, I aim to help the public better understand, and more fully appreciate, the Department's critical and surprisingly complex mission. I also help Sanitation employees recognize the profound importance of their work.

Rosa Carrasquillo (OHSS Intensive 2013) is Associate Professor of Caribbean, Latin American and Latino History at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. Rosa Elena is also active in the Latino community in Worcester, MA, and form part of Latino Education Institute Community Advisory Board. Presently, she is working in the completion of the book manuscript, The People’s Poet: Life and Myth of Ismael Rivera, an Afro-Caribbean Icon.

Rosie Jacobson (October Mini Intensive 2021) is a Brooklyn born, Philadelphia based informal educator. With a BA in Anthropology from Earlham College and a Masters in Education, Culture and Society from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Academically and personally interested in how young people build their own identities in this weird world, she has spent the last several years working with teens on literacy based projects that encourage them to tell their own stories. She is currently collecting pandemic stories of the residents of Northeast Pennsylvania with the Lackawanna Tintype Project.

Rosanna Dent (OHSS Intensive 2021) is a historian of science and an Assistant Professor of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is broadly interested in how human interactions unfold in the context of knowledge production, and the implications of these relationships for questions of political and social justice. Her current book manuscript examines the history of human sciences research in A’uwe-Xavante (Indigenous) communities in Central Brazil.

Rosalyne Shieh (December Mini Intensive 2021) is an architect and educator. She is part of a collaborative architecture practice between Houston and New York City and teaches at MIT. Her research and creative work is looking at place at the intersection of material culture, oral history, and postcolonial identity in Taiwan.

Rosen Eveleigh (November Mini Intensive 2023) is a graphic designer, researcher and teacher working with artists, archives, cultural institutions, curators, editors and publishers to produce books, graphic identities, typefaces, websites, texts, and other works. They teach at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Rosie Moosnick (OHSS Intensive 2014): I’m a sociologist by training and of recent have moved away from doing traditional social scientific work. In 2012 my book, “Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity,” (University Press of KY) was published. The book differed from my early work in that I used names and faces and delved into my own family’s history as Jewish Kentuckians and the intersection of our lives with those of non-Jewish Arab Kentuckians—working from the belief that Arabs and Jews could see their likenesses in out of the way places in the US and via women’s tales. Currently, I am working on a project showcasing contemporary activists in the six states (Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida) along interstate I-75. I-75 serves as a backdrop for discussing local political realities and offers a cross-section of middle America and the political-moral issues numerous states are tackling—deeply divisive and moral issues such as gay rights, abortion, immigration, fossil fuels, and gun control. Each state will be the stage for a single issue, and activists from opposite sides of the issue will be featured. Essentially, the work seeks, in a small way, to tackle the political division penetrating the US by documenting the stories of opposed passionate activists.

I, Russell Garofalo (no relation to either) (Radio 2014) , was a performer, writer, and video editor when I took a day job helping a tax preparer. Realizing my friends and I were doing our taxes poorly, I started Brass Taxes as a place for freelancers, artists, and other nice people to get tax help even if they weren’t rich, lazy, or scared of numbers. The reason I like my job is for the honesty I get from people, and the intersection of verifiable numbers and human emotion. I think if we talked more openly about what money means to us we’ll spend it in ways that make us happier. When I talk to people about money I hear so much about them; I hear what they’re scared of, who they wish they were and who they are. I’d like to share conversations about money that sound the way I hear them. I’d like to make a series of radio stories about the different situations I see and about how similar we all are in our anxiety about having numbers associated with our lives.

Ruth Melville’s (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) fiction and non-fiction writing has been published in magazines and literary journals in Australia. She has had several short plays produced, and in 2014 was shortlisted for the Edward Albee Inscription Playwriting Scholarship. For many years Ruth worked as a registered nurse in hospitals and community health settings in Sydney. She also managed a program to assist older people experiencing homelessness access secure accommodation. Ruth’s interest in the discipline of oral history was piqued while working as a writer with Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In 2018, she presented a paper at the Oral History Northern Ireland Conference based on interviews with writers from the commission about the challenges of listening to and writing stories of trauma.

Ry Garcia-Sampson (OHSS Intensive 2017, OHSS Intensive Guest Instructor 2018): My name is Ry Garcia-Sampson and I grew up in El Paso, Texas along the border with our sister city, Juarez, Mexico. I have a BA in Ethnic Studies and am currently a 4th year MD/MPH student doing a year of fellowship with the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs at Warren Alpert Medical School. As part of my project for that fellowship, I am interested in collecting the oral narratives of transgender, gender nonconforming, and non-binary people in the US and their experiences and understandings of what it means to be healthy. The goal of the project is to make these narratives accessible to health care providers as they learn how to improve health care for these communities. I live in Rhode Island with my wife (a UU minister in training) and our cat, Taj.

Sabine Bernards (OHSS Intensive 2014, Staff) is originally from Portland, Oregon and has lived in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn for six years. In her past work life, she spent six years supporting grassroots organizing around New York City with grants and workshops, which taught her about the power and importance of community-led change. A two-time Oral History Summer School student, she launched an oral history project to record the stories of long-time community organizers in New York City and a family oral history project recording her American and Swedish family stories. She is a member of Regeneracion radical childcare collective and No Disrespect anti-street harassment collective, as well as an amateur bread-baker and print-maker.

Sally Zwartz (OHSS Intensive 2014, Radio 2014): My background is mainly in journalism/writing and I have a long involvement in community writing projects of one kind of another; over the years my interest has shifted to oral history, initially because of its respect for the person speaking … At the moment I’m working as an interviewer for family memoirs and also for a storybank project for a Legal Aid organisation, doing interviews with lawyers, clients etc as a way to capture the value/significance of the work the organisation does. In another part of my life I write about children’s books/reading and am involved in various projects to promote these, one of which is a regular hour-long podcast of music, stories and poems for kids that I produce for a local community radio station. I’m from New Zealand originally and have lived in Sydney, Australia for many years - this will be my first trip to the US.

Samantha Gloffke (OHSS Intensive 2018, Oral History for Organizations 2021) is the Admin & Operations Manager at Kite’s Nest. Her focus is on supporting Kite’s Nest staff and community members by managing behind-the-scenes processes and communications. For nearly a decade, Sam has been honing her operations management skills in the food world. Prior to that, she worked for years as a multi-generational caretaker. Sam is passionate about tuning in - listening closely for the needs of an individual or group and offering up the reflections, care, and resources that may be needed to support connection, creativity, and visionary action. She loves painting, cooking, block-printing, working with clay and found treasures, cultivating warm spaces, heart-to-hearts, intergenerational bonding, making and sharing playlists, and written, oral, and visual storytelling. She is deeply invested in the collective work of building joyful, imaginative, abolitionist futures.

Samira Koujok (October Mini Intensive 2021) is a human rights researcher from Lebanon who documents and investigates human rights abuses and developments in the MENA region. She currently works at the UN-OHCHR as a human rights officer. she has been involved in the issue of missing persons related to the Syrian conflict and has been tracking the evolution of the conflict since it began in 2011. The mission of her work is the adoption of a feminist lens in the promotion of justice in Syria. Previously, Samira worked with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which is the only international organization that exclusively focuses on locating and identifying missing persons. Before that, she managed a research program on the oral history of human rights discourse in the Arab world. Samira is also the co-author of a chapter on the Political Participation of Women in the Arab world. Her personal research interest revolves around intergenerational trauma and sexuality.

Sammy Sass (OHSS Intensive 2016): My name is Sammy; I am a 26 year old artist and teacher from Boston. Currently I’m working as a potter, a pottery instructor, and a writer. 10 months ago I launched an oral history//community storytelling project called Gathering Voices, which collects the spoken history of young adults (late 20s/early 30s) with LGBTQ parents. Before I dove into the life of a maker, I worked in public health for a few years and did a lot of lay-teaching in pottery, writing, cooking, writing, and ESL. I’m deeply passionate about the role of art and making in our increasingly consumerist//cheap-production world, and it’s capacity to enable self-knowing, social justice, and liberation.

Sandra Elzerman (OHSS Intensive 2013): My favorite part of my job as a lawyer is interviewing the client’s employees and learning about their work, the company’s business and their industry. I connected the dots between that “touchstone” of my work and oral history projects after listening to an interview of a former oral history archive director. After hours, I have been a photography student at Museum of Fine Arts Houston studio school for many years. I have been thinking about using some family stories as the basis of a photography project and want to develop an oral history project to capture family history and stories. I have also been active for many years in my neighborhood, most recently as co-chair on the committee that successfully petitioned the city to create a historic district in our neighborhood. I would now like to develop an oral history project for the neighborhood.

Sara Baum (Building Your Own Transcription Style Guide 2024) has been transcribing audio for 25 years, since the days of microcassettes! She is the founder and owner of Sharp Copy Transcription, which specializes in oral history transcription. In her role, she works collaboratively with oral historians to produce transcripts tailored to the needs of their many fascinating projects. Driven by the belief that who does transcription and how transcription is done is really important, she has worked to build a team of transcribers from around the U.S. and the world who bring diverse backgrounds and deep knowledge of language, dialects, accents, cultures, and subject matters to their work. She enjoys the challenge of creating transcripts that capture in written form the energy, cadence, and content of oral conversations; that honor and respect the full range of human voices and experiences; and that acknowledge and address the biases and subjectivities inherent to the transcription process. She has a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s degree in urban planning and public policy. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and now lives in Chicago, Illinois, with her partner, her three children, and her dog.

Sara B. Franklin (Archive 2013) considers herself a cook and writer foremost, though interviewing, oral history and academia seem to be creeping in more and more these days. She’s worn many hats in the world of food, farming in Waltham and Northampton, Massachusetts; writing as a restaurant critic for The Valley Advocate; working with small farmers at the New York-based WhyHunger; and developing content for the American Museum of Natural History. She is currently in the Food Studies doctoral program at New York University and works as a freelance cookbook reviewer and oral historian on the side. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Sara Kendall (OHSS Intensive 2012, OHSS Assistant 2012, Archive 2013, Project Lab 2014): I’m interested in cities and change, community-based education, and making radio with kids. I’ve lived and worked in Hudson since 2010. I’m currently a co-director and an educator at Kite’s Nest, an alternative learning environment and resource for children and families in Hudson. Beginning in the fall, I’ll also start a part-time master’s program in urban studies with the Centre for Oral History & Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal. I was the founding Station Manager of WGXC: Hands-on Radio (90.7-FM) , a community radio station and participatory media project in Hudson. And in July 2012, I helped Suzanne Snider to launch the Oral History Summer School, which introduced me to a transformative language and framework for doing qualitative research and documentary work, and for listening to the world around me.

Sarah Carlisle (Oral History for Educators 2019) Is a writer and gardener living in Brooklyn, NY. During the weekdays she manages an after school kids culinary program called Allergic to Salad and on weekends she manages a local farmers market and helps to coordinate and grow Q Gardens Community Farms. Sarah grew up living between two disparate communities in rural southwest New Hampshire and suburban Boston before moving to Portland, OR to attend Reed College where she studied 18th c British Literature (yes, mostly Jane Austen). After an eye-opening summer job as a farm educator, accessible food education became her passion, and she spent 2 years managing a kitchen, growing food, and gaining experience in the field before moving to Brooklyn with her partner and dog. She plans to spend 2019 pursuing new directions and communities in search of a farmhouse with lots of garden space, an apple tree, and room to settle and grow.

Sarah Dohrmann (April Mini-Intensive 2021) is a Brooklyn, NY-based writer of literary nonfiction, a teacher of writing, and an independent editor and writing coach. Sarah is also a first-year MSW student at the Silberman School of Social Work at CUNY–Hunter College. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House Magazine, The Iowa Review, New York, Bustle, Condé Nast Traveler, and the New York Observer, among others. She has received writing grants and awards from Fulbright (Morocco), the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Aspen Writers’ Foundation (Aspen Words), and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize). She teaches writing in New York University’s Liberal Studies Core Program, in Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and Special Programs, in the Bard College Language & Thinking Program, and as a writer-in-residence with Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) in New York City public schools and community sites. She also leads a private, personal nonfiction writing workshop for women and femme-identifying writers called DIVING INTO THE WRECK. (sarahdohrmann.com)

Sarah Geis (I Am Sitting In A Room 2017) is an audio documentarian, social work school drop-out, and former artistic director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival. She began her career traveling the country recording interviews with StoryCorps, and is interested in the intersection of oral history, documentary, and community building. Recent projects include an episode of Love + Radio, a series of podcasts for the Poetry Foundation, and two stories on BBC Radio 4.

Sarah Hesketh (Oral History & Writing 2019) Sarah Hesketh is poet, editor and educator. Her books include Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf (Penned in the Margins, 2009) and The Hard Word Box (Penned in the Margins, 2014), a collection of poems and interviews inspired by this experience of being a poet in residence in a dementia care home. In 2015, she was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to produce ‘Grains of Light’, a sequence of poems based around the story of Holocaust survivor Eve Kugler. She lives in London and is currently completing a practice based Phd at the University of Roehampton on making poetry from oral history.

Sarah Huck (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) is a chef, writer, and café owner living in Brooklyn. Her career has centered around the intersection of sustainable food, art, and community. She holds a master’s degree in Food Studies from NYU and a culinary degree from the Natural Gourmet Institute. In 2017, she was a recipient of the James Beard Foundation's Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (WEL) fellowship. Sarah is also the author of two cookbooks, the second of which told the story of a third-generation family farm in upstate New York. More recently, she has returned to school (Hunter College) to pursue a curatorial certificate and master’s degree in art history; she hopes to focus her studies on the relationship between art and the natural world, especially as it relates to artisan crafts.

Sarah Lay (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) I have been a nurse practitioner working in and around Boston for almost 30 years. My interest in oral histories was initially peaked while caring for elderly and feeling an urgency to preserve their stories. I am a fiddler, enjoy music and dancing, which keeps me whole. I am currently working on contact tracing for covid 19, and am convinced that deep listening to personal narratives is critical to bridge the gaps that divide and separate us from each other.

Sarah Macaraeg (Trauma 2013) is an aspiring publisher, essayist, and oral historian currently at work on The Domestic Worker Oral History Project with fellow OHSS participant Dao Tran. Plans for the project include a book collection which independent press Haymarket Books has contracted for future publication. Sarah has spent the previous 6 years in publishing and currently works at Columbia College in Chicago where she is also in the midst of creating a narrative-driven digital magazine of art and politics in the city.

Sarah A. Singh (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is an artist, historian, and community organizer. She creates as "slimm" (IG: @slimmdoodle). Her abstract ink pen line drawings play on traditional Southeast Asian portraiture as both an homage to her ancestral roots and a satire on identity and familial fracture. She is passionate about the connective power of story telling and received a B.A. from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and an M.A. in Twentieth Century U.S. History from Tulane University. A NJ-native, she has lived in New Orleans since 2019 and currently works with students around social justice and arts initiatives at Xavier University of Louisiana.

Saraly Vargas (Oral History Intensive 2024) is currently a Library Specialist at the Barnard Library which includes overseeing the daily movement of the general library collection at the circulation desk, coordinating extended loaning periods for First-Generation and/or Low-Income students, and creating promotional or informational materials such as flyers and zines. Saraly graduated from Barnard in 2022 and holds a B.A. in Sociology with a minor in Education Studies. In her library work, Saraly is passionate about fostering a truly welcoming, accessible, and well-funded library space for QBIPOC users to engage in genuine community programming. Saraly is also a huge crafter and enjoys jewelry making, painting, knitting and most recently ceramics.

Sarita Daftary (OHSS Intensive 2013, Guest Instructor OHSS Intensive 2017, OHSS Intensive 2016) has extensive experience in community organizing and community development work in Brooklyn. She worked at United Community Centers from 2003-2013 as part of the food justice and community organizing project, East NewYork Farms! During that time she helped to grow the project significantly, while maintaining a focus on developing community leadership, and led ENYF to become a nationally recognized model for youth and community engagement in urban agriculture and community markets. She joined El Puente in May 2015 as the director of the Green Light District, EP's ten year strategic holistic sustainability initiative. Sarita has recently worked in part-time and consulting roles with the Brooklyn Arts Council, Steve's Camp (at Gotham Professional Arts Academy) , and the Food Dignity Project (a community-based participatory research initiative). Sarita graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in sociology and government, and is also a graduate of the Leadership New York Fellowship, organized by Coro New York and the Leadership Caucus of the Community Resource Exchange. Sarita attended Oral History Summer School’s Intensive workshop in 2013 and will be presenting her oral history project related to East New York at the 2016 Intensive. A version of this presentation was shared at the 2015 Oral History Association Conference as part of a panel on Gentrification and Housing Justice in NYC.

Sarah Troy (November Mini Intensive 2023): I’m a freelance journalist currently based in Colorado with almost a decade of experience reporting from across the western U.S., the U.S.-Mexico border region, and South America for a variety of magazines and publications. I’m driven by compelling, narrative-driven storytelling that centers people and places on the margins of society. In addition to my work as a print journalist, I’ve collaborated with filmmakers for documentaries about the mining industry in Peru and indigenous youth fighting to preserve their rivers in the U.S. and Latin America. I studied English literature at Williams College and have an MFA from Columbia University. I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada and love making pottery, speaking Spanish, and rock climbing.

Sarah Young, (December Mini Intensive 2021) as a movement artist, has collaborated with and performed works by dance makers Nancy Stark Smith, David Dorfman, Jill Sigman, Hilary Easton, Stephan Koplowitz, and the Treehouse Shakers. She served as the Executive Director of Earthdance from 2013-18. She studied the Feldenkrais Method under the direction of David Zemach-Bersin, NYC, becoming a practitioner in 2015. She is an Alum of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, BFA 2003, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, Morocco 2008-10, and mother of Calder Savage. She divides her time between Northampton, Massachusetts, and Stolzenhagen, Germany.

Sarita Hernandez (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is a XicanaDyke artivista-escritora from Norwalk in Los Angeles County. Sarita is currently a graduate student at University of Illinois, Chicago in the Museum and Exhibition Studies and the publication coordinator for the Fwd: Museums Journal. Sarita is always thinking about TQPOC love, cycles of Chicano family violence and resilience, and payasa resistance through digital storytelling, painting, and creative nonfiction writing. Sarita's capstone project engages creative reinterpretations or disidentifications of everyday objects to address cycles of violence and queer spaces within Chicano family violence.

Scott Gyenes (OHSS Intensive 2015) is currently an Adjunct Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania and History Department Chair and teacher at York Country Day School. He has a great deal of professional experience, having taught and led student organizations at the collegiate and college-preparatory level for over 25 years, worked with various non-profit organizations in helping them understand and implement the proper historical research and methodological process. Scott brings a wealth of educational and non-profit leadership experience having served as an adjunct professor at five colleges, in senior leadership roles for various non-profit social service agencies and leadership positions at many educational institutions. In addition to his teaching, Scott has also served both his local and global communities as a Board of Director on numerous non-profit organizations such as: the York College of Pennsylvania Alumni Association, East Berlin Community Library, Knights of Columbus Home Association Council 871, the Raintree Association, and currently as a board of director for the NGO Marie Mambu Makaya Foundation. Scott’s has many goals in learning about oral history such as incorporating the skills into his required service learning class projects, as well as utilizing oral history in his research projects currently underway examining the lives of Democratic Republic of Congo emigrants living in Pennsylvania.

Sean Ferguson (OHSS Intensive 2013): I’m a Junior at Vassar College, but my home is in New Jersey. At Vassar, I’m majoring in History with a minor in Asian studies. This Summer I will be working with the Rutgers Oral History Department and a Non-Profit based in my home state to collect oral histories of South Asian immigrants and their experiences in America and abroad. I’ll be concluding my research at the end of the summer with a presentation on my findings. I look forward to incorporating the skills I’ll learn at the Oral History Summer School into my senior thesis at Vassar and eventually graduate school.

Seher Vora (Shaking the Family Tree 2019) I recently graduated with a Master's degree in International Relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts. As a child of the Pakistani Diaspora in the U.S., interest in my own cultural history and love of reading and telling stories led me to develop an avid interest in history and political science studies. My current career pursuits have therefore built on these interests; I worked as an Editor at publications where people's stories are the priority and inclusion of diverse narratives and perspectives is a must. Previously, I worked in immigration law, which also gave me a chance to understand the importance of storytelling and understanding the experiences of others. Outside of work, I love reading, writing, and scenic walks, and am a dedicated caffeine lover.

Selene Ross (OHSS “Talking White” 2022): I’m a senior audio producer at Dipsea, a platform for feminist audio erotica. At Dipsea I've produced over 400 stories, casting and directing voice actors, and overseeing sound-design. Prior to joining Dipsea, I interned with The Kitchen Sisters, KALW, and Women's Audio Mission, and worked on stories for NPR, KCRW, and independent podcasts.

Selha Graham Cora (OHSS Intensive 2013): Mom of 6, local business owner living here in Hudson pre-gentrification days. Columbia Greene Alumni. Recycler, gardener, Native of Jamaica Muslim revert 3 years.

Shaina Bauman (November Mini Intensive 2023) (she/her) is a creative and curious communications professional with over a decade of experience writing and editing for international clients and audiences. She is currently a senior communications advisor at JSI, where she’s worked since 2017 to support project teams in shaping effective communication strategies and creating content with an emphasis on data-driven storytelling. Shaina also leads multimedia campaigns and audio content development for JSI's corporate communications. She has a BA in Spanish and in English, an MA in International Human Rights, and an MA in Art & Politics.

Shankaron Hassan (they/them/he/him) (Project Design Lab 2024) is a writer, organizer, and woodworker from Somalia, currently based in the Midwest. Their work explores Afro-Futurism in the diaspora through mysticism, migration, and transgenderism, in different mediums from woodworking and silk screen printing to zines and documentary filmmaking. They are currently developing an oral history project collecting and preserving Black Trans stories of migration in conjunction with their work in immigration defense.

Shannon McMullen, (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) PhD is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She has a collaborative art practice defined as critical gardening at the intersection of nature, art and technology. She and her collaborator combine new media art and social inquiry to produce speculative social spaces and time-based installations. Her work has been shown internationally at venues such as DocLab at the International Film Festival in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 5th International Art and Science Exhibition and Symposium (TASIES 2019), Beijing, China, Science Gallery, Dublin, IE; Art Center Nabi, Seoul, Korea and ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany. McMullen is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Art & Design and the Program in American Studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Sharon Kitchens (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) has lived in Maine for a couple decades. She has written about food and agriculture for a variety of New England publications. Every week she can be seen carrying an armload of library books. She loves hanging out in cafes eating chocolate croissants and sipping lavender lattes. Her fondness for Patti Smith’s poetry is matched only by her love of Taylor Swift’s lyrics. She is a cat and dog person. Sometimes she blogs at mysterydetectionclub.blogspot.com. *My first book Stephen King's Maine: A History and Guide is due out in May 2024.

Sharece Johnson (Oral History for Educators 2019, Oral History for Organizations 2021) I was born in Queens and raised in Hudson. I graduated with a BA in Communications from the University at Albany. In my journey I have been involved with most of the organizations in Hudson that involve Youth. I grew up going to the youth program at TSL a theater company central in Hudson. There I got to explore my interests in music, theater, poetry and visual arts. In high school I sang choral and classical music which also followed me into college. During my early college years I served as a mentor through Americorps in Hudson. At that time I started a Glee Club and Girls empowerment club. My late years of college I started working with Kite's Nest as a lead educator of the Social Justice Leadership Academy. Since then I've been working with Kite's Nest as the After School Coordinator.

Dr. Shawna Murray-Browne (Oral History Intensive 2024) is a liberatory strategist, community scholar, mind-body healer, and professional speaker. She is the Principal Consultant at Kindred Wellness LLC and trained as an integrative psychotherapist. Dr. Shawna is curious about what happens when we question colonial thinking and make space for the ways of knowing held by folk of African descent in every aspect of life.

Dr. Shawna works at the intersection of healing, ancestral wisdom, and deep support for organizations, corporations, and everyday humans seeking liberation. Her clients have included human service and political advocacy organizations, foundations, and universities. Intuitive, authentic, and high energy, she is committed to helping communities reclaim collective wisdom to triumph over the effects of historic and present-day trauma. Dr. Shawna was named by The Huffington Post as one of the “Ten Black Female Therapists You Should Know,” featured on the PBS special Mysteries of Mental Illness, and was a two-time guest on the popular, Therapy for Black Girls podcast.

She completed her doctorate at the University of Maryland, School of Social Work where she gained her Master of Social Work. Her dissertation explored oral histories as a decolonial site of inquiry around the healing ways of Black women advocates during the civil rights movement.

Sheila Cavanagh: (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) I am a professor of Shakespeare at Emory University in Atlanta. I recently completed a Master's in Public History at Georgia State University, but was unable to take their Oral History course. I had hoped to attend this class in person, but am thrilled that it will be available online. Emory is building up its offerings in Public Humanities and Oral History is an important part of that field.

Shellie Zhang (Oral History for Organizations 2021) (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, the diaspora and popular culture. She creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved.

Shipra Upadhyay (Song Collecting and Composing 2023) is an archaeologist with keen interest in mural, music and ritual studies. She started her career as UNFPA-consultant for its project on Life Skills Education. As post-doctoral rsearcher she initiated "Climate Emetgency Collective". It fscilitates dialogue on community, envirinment, culture and practice. She was managing editor for Journal of Cobtempoery Thought for its special edition on Global South Cultural Dialogue Project.

Shola Cole (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) Cole is a queer Afro-Caribbean/UK born immigrant and a multi-tuned performance artist in the NYC. An obsession with pirates, food, storytelling and good customer service often leads to many discussions and trips to yummy cheap eats. Using radio, movement and an alter ego called Pirate Jenny - Cole explores historical contexts within personal legacy as a queer woman of color and former classically trained musician existing in the US. A new ongoing work, Biographie of Service, uses narrative, figure modeling and viewer participation to look at her own journey within art and the service industry and to critique the grey area between customer care and performance. www.piratehaterjenny.com

Silvia Chelala (OHSS Intensive 2014) I have been involved in traditional and non-traditional education most of my life. Traditional academic has been my place in the last 30+ years. Now, facing a transition to retirement, I wanted to become immersed in people’s stories. Thus, oral history came to mind both as a way to inquiry (health project with Latino men and their health) and as a way to document and honor other’s experiences.

Sindhu Gnanasambandan (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) Sindhu Gnanasambandan is an audio producer, previously working with Planet Money and Gimlet's StartUp podcast. After studying Economics in college, she spent a year living in a zen buddhist monastic community and now spends much of her time plotting how she can become a monk. Her next project is a year long research fellowship with Stanford's Poverty and Inequality Center, involving interviewing hundreds of Americans about their daily lives.

Sonia Pacheco (OHSS “Talking White” 2022) is a librarian archivist in the Archives & Special Collections department at the Claire T. Carney Library (UMass Dartmouth). Her professional interests include the relationship between archives and immigrant communities, capturing and preserving community memory, and teaching primary source literacy. These interests will be applied to the recent Mass Humanities grant she received to conduct an oral history project to document the Cape Verdean community in Dartmouth (MA).

Sopanit “Dede” Angsusingha (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of Middle East and North Africa at Georgetown University. She has received the Royal Thai Government Scholarship to study Middle Eastern History in the United States and return to Thailand to teach Middle Eastern history in Bangkok, Thailand. Her research interests include women and gender in the Arab World, the British Mandate of Iraq, and colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. She is currently working on a dissertation on the construction and negotiation of gender norms and national identity through missionary education in monarchical Iraq and the transnational networks of Iraqi students and missionary educators across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Oral history interviewing will help me include the voices of Iraqi men and women which rarely appeared in the archives.

Sophie Kazis (OHSS Oral History Training for the ACORN Oral History Project 2023, Song Collecting and Composing 2023) is a Brooklyn-based audio journalist and documentarian with a background in radio and podcast production. She is currently the Project Manager for the ACORN Oral History Project, a public archive of audio interviews with members, leaders, and staff of the community organizing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (1970-2010). She worked as a podcast producer at VICE News for almost 6 years, before which she attended the Transom Story Workshop. However, she proudly got her start in community radio -- first at Oberlin College’s radio station and later at an arts-based youth development organization in East Boston where she helped launch a Low-Power FM radio station. Sometimes she makes music too.

Spencer Beswick (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) I am a PhD Student researching the history of anarchism in North America and Europe. My academic work seeks to engage with contemporary social movements and uncover histories of resistance and experiments with alternative forms of social life and organization. I am involved with Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop in Ithaca, New York.

Stacey Engels (Shaking the Family Tree 2017) is a playwright and writer of fiction and non-fiction prose. She has worked as a consultant, workshop leader and program manager in a variety of educational and human services settings in NYC. She is completing her MFA in Memoir at Hunter College and is an Adjunct Lecturer at Hunter and Lehman Colleges. She is working on a book about walking the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain and essays about the Anglo-Montreal diaspora.

Stacey Farnum (October Mini Intensive 2021) has a BA in History and Political Science and and MS in Library and Information Studies (with a concentration in Archives) and an MS in History. I have worked in archives and for non-profits.

Stella Yoon (Oral History for Educators 2019) Stella Yoon is a designer, strategist and at the helm of Hudson River Exchange. After studying illustration at the School of Visual Arts, Stella wove her way through a series of design and styling roles across the worlds of retail and photography collaborating with magazines, agencies, retailers and fellow artists. During her decade of experience as visual merchandiser, prop stylist, and graphic designer in NYC, she honed her gift for creating rich visual narratives. Her curiosity and passion for learning moved her to take risks, and say yes when opportunity came knocking. A trip upstate to a biodynamic farming workshop introduced Stella to the small, river city of Hudson. She felt an instant kinship with the community of growers and artisans who valued working with their hands. Within days, she was packing to leave NYC. The move allowed Stella to connect with the people behind the food on her plate, those who made the plate itself—and even the table underneath. Those early conversations sparked the idea that became Hudson River Exchange. These days, Stella uses her wide-ranging expertise to help burgeoning brands bring their ideas to life. “HRE is where I get to share everything I’ve learned,” she says.

Stephanie E. Goodalle (Oral History Intensive in Residence at Sylvan Motor Lodge 2023) is the founder of Goodalle Art Advisory. GAA assists clients with acquiring art and maintaining their collections. She is the creator of DSCNNCTD, a podcast dedicated to exploring the practices of emerging and mid-career Black and POC artists across disciplines. These discussions decenter the sociocultural lenses of trauma and violence to allow for conversations on aesthetics, fun, history, craftsmanship, and ingenuity to thrive. Goodalle is also an editor and recently wrote an essay for Allana Clarke’s solo exhibition Allana Clarke: A Particular Fantasy. Her essays and interviews have been published in publications such as ART PAPERS, BOMB, BURNAWAY, and Kenturah Davis: Everything That Cannot Be Known.She is a contributing editor for BOMB and was formerly their Oral History Fellow completing interviews for artists such as Maren Hassinger, Linda Goode Bryant, Dindga McCannon, and Janet Olivia Henry & Sana Musasama. Goodalle received her BA from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA and a MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Stephanie Khoury (October Intensive 2022): I am a project associate at the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné in New York. I joined the team in 2019 and have since researched and catalogued artworks created by Frankenthaler in preparation for publication. My time in the arts has included a variety of experiences from packing an art museum’s entire collection for temporary relocation, to organizing gallery exhibitions, to digging through newspaper microfilm for a private collector. I previously created and hosted the art history themed podcast “Disturbing the Piece.” I hold a master’s in art history from the University of Denver, Colo.

Stephanie Loveless (Shaking the Family Tree 2017) is a Montréal-born artist who works with sound, video, film and voice. She makes soft-speakers out of paper cups, performance prescriptions for audience-identified ailments, and sound works that attempt to channel the voices of plants, animals and musical divas. Loveless’ sound, video and performance work has been presented widely in festivals, galleries, museums and artist-run centers in North America, South America, Europe and the Middle East. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council and el Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico; awards from Kodak, the International Festival of Cinema and Technology, and the Malcolm S. Morse Foundation; and has completed residencies at el Centro Mexicano para la Musica y las Artes Sonoras (Morelia, Mexico) , the Coleman Center for the Arts (York, Alabama) , and Studio XX (Montréal, Québec). She holds MFAs from Bard College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a certification in Deep Listening. She currently lives and works in upstate New York.

Stephen Ballentine (Shaking the Family Tree 2017): I graduated from law school in 2014. After spending a year doing housing legal services and community organizing work in New York City, I moved to Albany to clerk for a judge. I love hearing people's stories, and I'm generally interested in understanding how oral history can fit into activism and my future professional work. But I'm particularly interested the family oral history workshop because I hope it will give me an opportunity and structure for exploring and preserving my own family history.

Stephanie Jenkins (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) has been working with Ken Burns and Florentine Films since 2010, first as production coordinator on The Central Park Five (2012), then associate producer on Jackie Robinson (2016), co-producer on East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020). She is currently a producer on the upcoming Muhammad Ali (2021). Stephanie enjoys nothing more than getting deep into archival footage research, both with personal and commercial collections. In addition to her work at Florentine, she has contributed archival research to non-fiction media such as WNYC’s Radiolab and Spike Lee’s Forty Acres and a Mule Productions. She is a 2018-2019 Impact Partners Producing Fellow. When not producing, Stephanie enjoys playing banjo, bass, and singing in various projects. She released her first solo EP in 2018, and has albums with her bands The Pearly Snaps and The Calamity Janes.

Steven Brokaw Jackson (October Intensive 2022): I’m an audio producer and sound designer based in Portland, Maine. Over the years I’ve made work for NPR, WBEZ, Love + Radio, 99PI, Serial, and other organizations. Today, I own a small production company focused on sound design, scoring, and mixing. While I love sound design and all things sonic, I sorely miss the reporting process—especially the interview experience—and I’m eager to get back to it in my professional life. I’m very much looking forward to this workshop.

Steven Zetlan (OHSS Online Intensive 2020) is a tenured faculty member of Laney College, a community college in Oakland, California, where he teaches English language skills to immigrants from around the world. He has had fun teaching his students to interview each other using the studio of the college radio station, and would like to make oral and written student histories a foundation of his teaching. In addition, Steve has a personal interest in documenting and celebrating LGBT history, and preserving the memories of holocaust survivors. Originally from New York, he has lived in the Bay Area since 1987. Steven received a master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from San Francisco State University in 2002, after a career in marketing, and has an undergraduate degree in communications with a specialization in broadcasting.

Sue Efferen (Oral History for Educators 2019) Originally from New York City, where she worked as a orthopedic then pediatric nurse, Sue Efferen transitioned into the field of education in 2000. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts/Amherst University Without Walls program, she received a B.A. in children’s learning, while minoring in psychology. Continued coursework in education was completed at the Collaborative for Educational Services in Northampton, MA, leading to teacher certification in Special Education. From 2000-2018, Sue worked in the Southern Berkshire Regional School District in Sheffield, MA. Her time there was spent teaching predominantly reading and math to third, fourth and fifth graders. Sue’s kind and fun-loving personality becomes apparent in her daily interactions with students and staff.

Susan Augenbraun (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) Susan is a writer, nonprofit events producer, and erstwhile historian. Her historical fiction seeks to make sense of the world through its near-forgotten details, to tell stories that would seem impossible if they hadn't truly happened. She was raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and holds a BA in history from the University of Chicago.

Susan Burns (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) I am a historian of modern Japanese history and work on the history of medicine and public health, with a particular focus on stigmatized diseases. I have in mind an oral history project the history of the care of the mental ill. Iwakura, an agricultural village located outside of Kyoto, has a long history of community based care and today is the site of two private psychiatric hospitals that together have over 1300 beds. I've done a good deal of archival research on Iwakura, but I think oral history will add a new dimension to my work. I am particular interested in interviewing people in the community and medical professionals.

Suzanne L. Schulz (C&C 2015) received her PhD in Media Studies in August 2014 from the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin. From 2014-2015, Suzanne was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UT-Austin and a visiting researcher in Mardin, Turkey. Her research on contestations around cinema in North India included interviews and archival research. Prior to her academic career, Suzanne worked for six years in documentary filmmaking in New York and Boston. She is eager to incorporate oral history methodology including audio recording and photography into her research and teaching.

Suzi Kim (Oral History for Educators 2019) Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Suzi received a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Spanish from the University of Arizona. Upon graduation, Suzi traveled to Wonju, South Korea, to teach English at Yonsei ELP Institute, where she discovered her passion for education and working with children. After returning to Tucson, Suzi continued to pursue her teaching career as an English Language Learners Instructor at Southside Community School, a progressive charter school, where she taught until relocating to Hudson, New York. At Southside, Suzi led her own multi-age full-time classroom, designing syllabi, assessing student progress, finding creative ways to meet state rubrics, and honing her classroom management skills. She also served as the school’s after school Program Director. Suzi enjoys practicing yoga, painting, reading, and spending time with her dog, Elliott.

Suzy Subways (OHSS Intensive 2012): I am a writer and editor, and when I’m not at my part-time job as a medical copy editor, I’m working on Prison Health News, a national newsletter for people in prison, and an oral history project about an activist group I was part of in the 90s, the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!). SLAM! was a multiracial radical group based at the City University of New York (CUNY) that fought tuition hikes and the elimination of open admissions, and organized youth to resist police brutality and the prison industrial complex. I was an editor at POZ magazine starting in 2001 and later was the lead writer for the AIDS activist publication Solidarity Project. I write for The Indypendent, The Defenestrator, and other independent media publications; create video for Occupy Philly Media; write short fiction; and occasionally post on my blog, AIDS and Social Justice (http://aidsandsocialjustice.wordpress.com/). The SLAM Herstory Project is online at http://slamherstory.wordpress.com/, and my goal is to do many more interviews and edit them into a book. So far, I’ve only completed short articles and a pamphlet focused on one aspect of the group’s history, because my experience as a journalist has only prepared me for envisioning and structuring the work of smaller projects. I’m hoping that this workshop will help me figure out how to come up with a plan to move forward.

Taia Handlin (OHSS Intensive 2019) Journalism grad student. I'm a writer generally, and I've had the occasional podcast. I write about gender and sexuality, pop culture, and all their intersections. I had a podcast called 'Juicy Bits' about sex and politics. My favorite episode was with a Yale ornithologist about the political implications of bird sex.

Tamar Aizenberg (OHSS Intensive 2017) is a rising senior at Williams College majoring in History and Chemistry with a concentration in Jewish Studies. This summer, she is interviewing grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to examine their Jewish identity and what connection, if any, it has to their grandparents' experiences. These interviews will form the basis of her upcoming yearlong History thesis.

Tamara Beauboeuf: (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) I am a gender studies faculty member at Grinnell College and a qualitative sociologist by training. My published work has examined the pedagogies of Black women educators committed to social justice, the embodied impacts of being seen as a “strong Black woman,” and the educational vision of a pioneering student affairs professional, Lucy Diggs Slowe, at Howard University. Over the last two years, I have become intrigued by oral history given my involvement with recording and learning from the memories of the centenarian Edith Renfrow Smith ’37, who is the Grinnell College’s first Black alumna.

Tanu Kumar (OHSS Intensive 2018) is an urban planning and policy specialist, working on projects that combine planning, research, and advocacy to address challenges facing low and moderate-income communities. For the past 5 years, she's led the Pratt Institute’s economic development work in NYC and the region, providing technical assistance to government agencies and community-based organizations on equitable growth strategies. She has extensive experience in guiding and facilitating community-based planning processes. She also spent several years in India developing affordable housing and evaluating the impact of housing assistance programs.

Tanya Garcia (April Mini-Intensive 2021) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Baltimore, MD. She was raised in Florida, Puerto Rico, and South Carolina. In 2014, Garcia received her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is the recipient of awards such as the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation’s Fellowship in collaboration with Creative Alliance, as well as the Intercultural Leadership Institute’s 2018-19 national fellowship cohort. She participated in residencies including ACRE and awarded TrueQué’s curated residency in Ecuador themed, Natural Hybrids: Frictions Between Art and Ecology. Garcia was also co-founder of an internationally recognized literary arts publication, HYRSTERIA.

Tanya Jackson, M.A. (October Intensive 2022) is an experienced freelance videographer, independent media maker, educator and budding archivist. In her wide-ranging media production roles, Tanya has served in a variety of production roles for film, television and video projects. Through her production company, Life Happens Media Works, LLC, Tanya produces videos for corporate, educational, and community institutions, as well as conducting video/film production trainings; she continues to unfold her artistic practice through collaborative installations and cultural programming.

Tashi Choden (OHSS Intensive 2016): I founded the Himalayan Heritage at the Rubin museum. It is a platform for the Himalayan community (Tibetan, Nepalese, Bhutan, India and surrounding regions like Mongolia and China) to present and bring the living tradition and for the friends of the Himalayas to experience on the galleries. I'm also the founder of www.voicesoftibet.org and co-founder of TOHP - Tibetan Oral History Project.

Tatiana Bryant (OHSS Intensive 2021) is a librarian and professor in greater New York. She holds an MPA in International Public and Nonprofit Administration, Management, and Policy from New York University, an MS in Information and Library Science from Pratt Institute, and a BA in History from Hampton University. She works with nonprofits, cultural heritage organizations, and academic institutions and has taught university courses in Black digital humanities, Global Studies, and information literacy.

Tay Wiles (October Mini Intensive 2021) is a private investigator based in Berkeley, California. She conducts criminal defense investigations for public defender offices in the Bay Area, mostly on homicide cases, ranging from youthful offenders to appeals and capital defense. When she is not doing criminal defense, she conducts private civil investigations into fraud and corporate malfeasance. Tay previously worked as a journalist and editor for ten years, six of those at High Country News, a magazine based in rural Colorado that covers the western US. Her work also appeared in Mother Jones, Pacific Standard, KQED, UK Guardian, Slate and other outlets. Her interest in oral history is centered on current and historical stories of displacement in the Bay Area that come into view in every interview during the course of her investigative work.

Tayana Hardin (April Mini-Intensive 2021) has interests in prayer, ritual, and community literature projects. She is currently developing a project that archives prayer practices—in whatever form they might take: digital art, voice recordings, video recordings, music compositions, etc.—of black people throughout the state of Kentucky. She is also a professor of African American literature.

Terri Gentry (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) is a 3rd generation native of Denver. She is married to Dwight Gentry, with 4 children and 9 grandchildren. She attended Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, in Interior Design. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in African/African American Studies from Metro State College (University) of Denver, and a Master’s Degree in Humanities, focus in Public History and Museum Studies, from the University of Colorado Denver. She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Aurora, CO chapter. Terri works full time. She is a Volunteer Docent and on the board of directors at the Black American West Museum & Heritage Center. She conducts museum tours, the Five Points Walking Tour, and facilitates presentations about Black Americans in the West, and other topics to schools, community and government agencies, and businesses throughout the Denver Metro area, and Front Range communities. She recently began working at History Colorado, as Engagement Manager for Black Communities.

Theodore (Ted) Kerr (OHSS Intensive 2015) is a Canadian born Brooklyn based writer and organizer. His work focuses primarily on HIV/AIDs, related issues and community. Ted was the Programs Manager at Visual AIDS and is now currently doing his graduate work Union Theological Seminary, where he also works at the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice.

Theresa Casciato (Project Lab 2014): I am a multimedia professional and artist in Pittsburgh, PA. I began to study film and video production after I earned my BFA in Photography, from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. As I built my skills with sound recording, I worked as a Remote Sound Recordist for the documentary film, “The River Ran Red “, (1993). This film won a Cine Golden Eagle Award, in the History Category, and tells the story about the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892. I am interested in telling more stories that feature oral history recordings. I hope to find a way to use my talents with new technology, to create something lasting for future generations to access.

Tia Stokes (December Mini Intensive 2021) has always been interested in helping people solve problems. She started her career as a social worker assisting physically and emotionally fragile people in navigating challenging situations. Using a combination of counseling, coaching and common sense, she supported clients dealing with sickness, aging and trauma. Eventually her work with individuals led her to work with groups, developing and delivering training programs for government employees and nonprofit staff. Recognizing the synergy created by groups Tia continued her training in various facilitation methods, supporting organizations with strategic planning, board development and volunteer engagement. Having a client that needed policies and procedures written, Tia added technical writer to her services. Tia founded Meaningful Training in 2013 which provides consulting services in instructional design, technical writing, facilitation and training.

Tiffanie Beatty (Tiff) (Oral History for Organizations 2021) is Program Director of Arts, Culture, and Public Policy at National Public Housing Museum, she oversees the Museum’s public programs and events, including the Oral History Project and Entrepreneurship Hub. In 2020, she co-created Just Action Racial Equity Collaborative as a Chicago United for Equity Senior Fellow. She previously served as Director of Programming at the Chicago Humanities Festival as well as the Chicago Center For Urban Life and Culture.

Tiffany Trimmer (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022): I’m Executive Director of the University of Wisconsin La-Crosse Oral History Program (OHP, est. 1968) and an Associate Professor of History. Trained in world history and migration history, my current research focuses on how class, race, and neighborhood residency potentially shaped community members’ sense of belonging in La Crosse (and may have led people to settle permanently in the city or move elsewhere). As OHP Director, I’m also launching a new program of oral history interviews with alumni in 2023.

Tina Ruan (Song Collecting and Composing 2023, Shaking the Family Tree 2024): I am a Taiwanese writer and actor. My artistic process has been shaped deeply by the Story Circle and Oral History practices. Eighth year in NYC, I’ve come to find that, at its best, theater houses our contradictions. And the often nonlinear and expansive narratives allowed in my practice are good at that. Currently developing an intimate piece exploring the language of loss, I am curious about how one acquires the vocabularies to think, talk and dream about loss, from which love arises. A founding member of ALL THREE, an intergenerational performance ensemble whose work engages storytelling and creative expression among ourselves and with others. https://tinaruan.com/

Tobi Elkin (Verso Mini Intensive 2019) Tobi Elkin is a versatile writer, editor, reporter, interviewer, researcher, and multimedia content creator with interests in creativity, how people connect to their purpose, nonagenarians, and intergenerational storytelling. Selected as an Amtrak Writer-in-Residence (2016-2017) , she produced an award-winning short documentary film, “Train People,” inspired by her cross-country rail experience. The film was screened in more than a dozen film festivals in the U.S. and abroad in 2017. In 2018, she produced and directed a video about the Henry Street Settlement Senior Center with seniors sharing their experiences. Tobi is an advisor to and founding member of Seward Park Conservancy. She served as a consultant to the Taproot Foundation, a volunteer with New York Public Library’s Lower East Side Oral History Project, a mentor for Girls Write Now, and a member of Manhattan Community Board 3's Parks & Waterfront committee. She's an adjunct instructor at Montclair State University's School of Communication and Media.

Tobi Jacobi (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016) is Professor of English at Colorado State University where she teaches courses on writing and literacy theory with a specialization in the work of incarcerated women writers. She directs the CSU Community Literacy Center and trains student and community volunteers to facilitate writing workshops with incarcerated adults and at-risk youth in Northern Colorado, a program that has been publishing and circulating writings from confined populations for 10 years. She has published on community literacy and prison writing in book collections and journals such as Community Literacy Journal, Corrections Today, Feminist Formations and the Journal of Correctional Education. Her edited collection (with Dr. Ann Folwell Stanford) , Women, Writing, and Prison: Activists, Scholars, and Writers Speak Out, was published in 2014. Her current research focuses on examining narratives of representation from a girls' training school in Hudson, NY in the 1920s and 1930s along with Dr. Laura Rogers. She is interested in exploring the ways that oral and visual storytelling can enhance our understandings of history and inspire social change.

Tomie Hahn (OHSS Intensive 2016) is an artist and ethnomusicologist. She is a performer of shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) , nihon buyo (Japanese traditional dance) , and experimental performance. She is an Associate Professor in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she is also the Director of the Center for Deep Listening. Contemplative practices have been a part of her life and pedagogical method for many years. Her artistic and research focus has been the transmission of embodied cultural knowledge, stemming from her life-long practice of traditional Japanese “practice arts” (okeikogoto). Tomie’s research spans a wide range of area studies and topics including: the senses and transmission, Japanese traditional performing arts, Monster Truck rallies, issues of display, gesture, and relationships of technology and culture. Her book, Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance was awarded the Alan P. Merriam prize (Society for Ethnomusicology).

Tonya Lockyer: (October Mini Intensive 2021) Named a “key cultural change-maker” by The Seattle Times, Tonya Lockyer has performed and collaborated with renowned artists in music, performance, public art, and design. Lockyer has published and exhibited her work inter/nationally, created commissions for international venues, participated in national conferences and funding panels, curated dance for world-class festivals and art fairs, and organized major cultural events. She have designed trans-disciplinary curriculums and award-winning humanities programs. During Lockyer’s tenure as Executive Artistic Director, Seattle’s Velocity became a national nexus for artist development, innovating community-led, equity-driven programming. Lockyer continues to vision and strategize with artists in the U.S and Canada on projects--from inspiration to deep human connections. Born in Newfoundland, she currently lives in the Pacific Northwest archipelago where she shares a life of writing and walking with her husband, a composer dedicated to documentary storytelling.

Tony Macaluso (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016): As the Director of Network Marketing & Syndication with the WFMT Radio Network in Chicago, Tony Macaluso oversees the distribution of several dozen classical music, jazz, folk, science and public affairs radio programs to radio stations throughout the United States and internationally including Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Jazz at Lincoln Center, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and others. He also helps develop new series and radio specials. Born in the Chicago suburbs, he grew up listening to WFMT (and especially Studs Terkel’s daily interview show) , studied journalism and Chinese, lived and taught in China and received a MA in Theater History from the University of Illinois. He is the author of Sounds of Chicago’s Lakefront, a book about the history of outdoor music in Chicago’s Grant Park and is currently working on a book about the cultural history of spaces at the tops of Chicago’s historic skyscrapers and an online cultural history of the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna.

Tracey Krulcik: (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) I am a native of Albany N.Y. and currently reside in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. with my husband and two French Bulldogs. I am the mother of two children. I have had a variety of jobs through the years, but my favorite has been raising my children. I went to S.U.N.Y. Potsdam for Political Science and Education. Writing, photography, baking, dogs, and being in nature, are just a few of my interests. I am focusing my time on writing and hopefully doing Oral Histories.

Travis Clough (he/they) (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) is a queer and trans person from Maine. After graduating from the University of Maine at Farmington in 2000, he moved to Boston to find other people like himself. Most recently, he was living in Portland, Oregon and worked as the Director of Operations for The Venture Out Project, an LGTBQ outdoor adventure non-profit. Since moving back to Maine, he attended the Salt Institute for Audio Storytelling where his interest in Oral History was sparked. When he's not making audio you can find him teaching quilt making, playing his banjo or canoeing the rivers of Maine.

Trinity Thompson (Oral History for Educators 2019) Trinity Thompson works as a residential faculty member at a semester called CITYterm, where she teaches literature and history to high schoolers. A multiracial woman who proudly hails from Honolulu, Hawaii, she grew up interested in the power of various forms of storytelling- both individual and collective. For her undergraduate and graduate degrees, Trinity would go on to Stanford University, where she would explore her relationship to these stories by studying English (Creative Writing) , Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Sociology. While there, she discovered that she enjoys personally creating short stories, film, and memoir, as well as using creative writing to help her students develop and share their voices. While she has never officially done oral history work, she is excited to explore this medium and bring it back to her students as a tool for personal and collective exploration. In her free time, Trinity can usually be found watching film, reading, eating sweets, or doing some combination of these.

Tyler Caughie (OHSS Intensive 2016): I currently manage a food pantry in Harlem. In the past I traveled extensively working seasonal agriculture jobs; started a food truck in the Pacific Northwest; worked for the Museum of History and Industry, Historical Seattle, and HistoryLink; worked with children with life-threatening illnesses; volunteered with Hospice. I'm drawn to Oral History as a methodology to engage, co-create, and ground narrative in context. I started working with a historic preservation group in Seattle on a project collecting oral histories about a landmark building in the Central District of the city. From there I worked on a project in dialogue with the WPA's American Guide series, collecting stories around Washington State. During my work with Hospice I became interested in oral history during end-of-life, work that I'd like to pursue further. As a resident of Harlem I have been participating in workshops and lectures put on by the Oral History department at Columbia.

Tyrone Sklaren: (December Mini Intensive 2021) In 1972 I was driving an Arnold Bakery delivery truck through the streets of Brooklyn's Park Slope. One day I saw several storefronts on Prospect Park West; not stores, just storefronts. I learned from a local storekeeper that Sidney Lumet was shooting a movie, and the storefronts were part of the set. After retiring from the retail business seven years ago, I attended KBCC, then Brooklyn College, where I graduated with honors and a BFA in creative writing. I tutored English language learners at the Brooklyn Public Library for two years. My oral history project centers on the 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery of the Chase Manhattan Bank on Avenue P and East Third Street, on which the movie ""Dog Day Afternoon"" was based, and the 1975 location filming on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. As a lifelong Brooklyn resident I feel I have a unique perspective and some personal contacts to mine, and since it's almost fifty years since the events, it's time to record the recollections of the witnesses."

Tynisa Wright (April Mini-Intensive 2021): I am a weekday anchor for WLIO-TV in Lima, Ohio. I have more than seven years of broadcast journalism experience. My roles over time have helped me become skillful in researching, enterprising, developing, writing and editing stories on deadline for recorded or live newscasts. I’m ready to dig even deeper with longer content. Although I have years of experience, I still have an eagerness to learn. I have the desire to make the community I live in a better place to live and work. I leverage my knowledge, skills and abilities to share news stories to viewers in our communities. I love connecting with the community and building connections in order to create contacts, leads, or sources for a news series.

Ula Kulpa (November Mini Intensive 2023, Project Design Lab 2024) is a public historian and documentary producer. Previously, she spent four years as a producer with Prologue Projects, helping make their flagship show Fiasco and covering topics like Boston school desegregation, the Iran-Contra affair, and the AIDS crisis. She is currently a student in Archives and Public History at NYU. She also holds an MA in Journalism - Literary Reportage from NYU and BA in History from the University of Chicago.

Vaidya Gullapalli (OHSS Intensive 2021): I am a writer and lawyer interested in, among other things, migration, and motherhood, and the experiences of people subjected to prisons and jails. Until recently, I was a Senior Contributing writer at the Appeal, an outlet focused on mass policing, surveillance, and incarceration and on the movements to do away with them. I've also been a human rights researcher in India and South Africa and a public defender in the Bronx. I am the mother of my 4-year old son, and devote a good chunk of my waking hours to thinking about parenting and motherhood and the relationships between parents and children and how they grow and change. As I’ve wondered how my experience as an Indian woman raising a child in the US inflects my relationship to parenting, I’ve been thinking through a project about the experiences of being an immigrant parent and of being the child of immigrants.

Vanessa Maruskin (Doc Film 2013) works as an Archival Researcher & Associate Producer in documentary film. She found an interest in oral history and research while studying at the New School. Her background includes work in theater and commercial production. She is currently working as the Archival AP on a feature documentary on Bill Cosby, and will begin similar work on a second feature documentary this summer.

Vianey Castrellon (OHSS Intensive 2013, Archive 2013): I have a degree in Journalism of the University of Panama and for over seven years I worked in Panama’s leading newspaper, La Prensa. During this period, I worked as an editor of the Political and International sections. In 2007, I started the work at the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) , the government entity that manages the Canal since 1999. In that same year the Panama Canal Expansion began and the ACP created a department to focus on its historic documentation. This effort includes photographic and video documentation, the recovery and preservation of historic objects and documents, and an oral history collection. I am part of the staff involved in the conduction of these oral history interviews. In the past five years I have been emerging myself in the world of the academic history and as a result of our oral history work in the Panama Canal Expansion Program, I have had the opportunity to present papers in the International Oral History Conference (Argentina, 2012) and in the Latinoamerican Oral History Meeting (El Salvador, 2013). Journalism was my first love but destiny wanted me to discover in the Panama Canal a second passion: oral history.

Victor Omni (Building Your Own Transcription Style Guide 2024): Victor Ultra Omni is a proud father in the iconic worldwide pioneering house of Ultra Omni. They employ methods of oral history to engage pioneers of house-structured ballroom culture. Their work is published or forthcoming in Trans Studies Quarterly (TSQ), Dialogo, The Black Scholar, and the textbook Feminist Studies:Foundations, Conversations, and Applications. They also are a co-founder of Emory’s Black Feminist Working Group. A current essay “Crystal Labeija, Femme Queens, and the Future of Black Trans Studies” is in issue 10 volume 1 of Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ).

Victoria Rey (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) is queer storyteller and activist raised in both Atlanta and Appalachia who came to Brooklyn by way of Providence, RI in 2013. A composer by training, Victoria has spent the last 10 years teaching middle schoolers the musicology of hip-hop and advocacy through documentary photography and film making, bringing arts integration to cities throughout the US, and curating arts programming and events for NYC’s young professionals in the arts. You can find her every Sunday from 9-11 pm on Radio Free Brooklyn or through her newsletter My Glass House at https://tinyletter.com/victoriarey

Vineet Chander (Oral History Winter School Mini-Intensive 2022) (he/him) is Assistant Dean, Hindu Life at Princeton University and Hindu Religious Life Advisor at the Lawrenceville School. He is the co-author of Hindu Chaplaincy (Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, 2017), and Hindu Approaches to Spiritual Care (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2019). He is a founding member of the North American Hindu Chaplains Association (NAHCA) and co-chair of that organization's Resource Development Committee. As the nation’s first full-time Hindu chaplain and program director in higher education, Vineet‘s work with Hindu-American students at one of the world’s premier educational institutions affords him a unique vantage point and powerful experiences from which to draw. He is a second-generation Hindu American, who was born and raised in New York City as the child of immigrants. Vineet earned his Juris Doctor degree from the George Washington University Law School and his MA in Religious Studies at Rutgers University. He is currently a doctoral candidate at New York University, where he has been appointed the inaugural Vera and Sam S. Jain Fellow in Vedanta Studies.

Walis Johnson (Guest Instructor, OHSS Intensive 2017) is a multidisciplinary artist/researcher whose work documents the experience and poetics of the urban landscape through oral history and visual ethnography, performance and artist walking practices. She is particularly interested in the intersection of documentary film, performance and socially engaged practice. Her work explores hidden fissures of culture and history that upend our understanding of the political, economic and cultural structures we use to define the American condition and ourselves. Her practice takes a critical view of the relationship between the personal and political in everyday life. Walis holds an MFA from Hunter College Interactive Media Arts and has taught at Parsons School of Design.

Walter Hergt (OHSS Intensive 2013, Doc Film 2013, Project Lab 2014, Experimental Ethnographies 2018) I have been doing a lot of carpentry/contracting in the vein of creating a social justice educational/retreat center in Millerton, NY. I am actively interested in video and perhaps video-documentary-ethnographic efforts but interested in more experimental approaches rather than the “rote” documentary/advocacy format. This fall and winter I have been studying and honing my photography skills, particularly documentary narrative skills, i.e. telling stories with a set of images. Very interested in combining this with audio to create home combinations of visual, audible, audio-video storytelling. This will be put to the test the rest of this winter and spring working on an oral history and portraiture project with the Black Urban Growers group in NYC.

Whitney Donielson (she/they) (Collaborative Narratives: A Podcasting Workshop with Sarah Geis 2024) works in higher education supporting nontraditional college students and student parents. In her free time, she pursues her passion, listening to and making audio stories. She is a 2017 graduate of the Transom Traveling Workshop (Catalina Island), where she made her first audio story about a lifetime resident of the island and a collector of Catalina Pottery. Whitney makes People of the Valley (https://www.podpage.com/people-of-the-valley/), which features stories from the Willamette Valley of Oregon. They want to continue to document and share the stories of people in their region, including the students they work with. The passing of a family member also sparked an interest in documenting family stories and family history, before it's too late. She is proudly queer, and volunteers with the nonprofit #StillBisexual. In addition to audio, Whitney likes to make crafts, cook, walk, hike, and hang out with her spouse and their small dog. In 2020 she visited all 100+ parks in her town.

Yadira Solis (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) is a first generation graduate from MSU Denver with a Bachelor’s in Psychology and a Minor in Political Science and now has a Masters in Social Work. She considers herself an activist and a proponent of equality, social justice, and diversity and firmly believes that our differences is what brings groups together. Her work is rooted in community and has worked with MSU Denver's College Assistant Migrant Program providing assistance to migrant first gen students, COLOR Latina where she lead Colorado’s Latino/a Advocacy Day for statewide constituents that lobby their legislators and provide testimonies to push forward laws, has worked with Community Language Cooperative proving language justice and education to organizations on how to be more equitable and inclusive towards communities of color. Now as the Director for History’s Colorado Museum of Memory Initiative she is tasked to expand the memory workshops statewide, and bring to light the unheard voices and collective memories in order to bring more diverse voices in the telling of history. In order to connect to her roots she dances but Mexican Folkloric Dancing, Ajua!!! we’re she’s able to unleash her passion for her culture.

Yasmin Mitchel (Oral History Intensive Chicago 2016, Archives/Production Assistant, E) is a current DePaul University student pursuing a BFA in Dramaturgy/Criticism with minors in History and Museum Studies. She has worked with both the Elk Grove Historical Museum and the Theatre Historical Society of America. With these organizations, Yasmin was trained in various museums fields such as archiving, collections management, exhibit design, audience engagement, and curation. What she enjoyed most was her time spent with oral history. Yasmin loved listening to the interviews and breaking them down into smaller parts that could be used for exhibitions. Recently she was awarded a fellowship to continue her work with the Chicago History Museum on their latest endeavor Forty Blocks: The East Garfield Park Oral History Project. This summer she will also be conducting oral histories with the Indo-American Heritage Museum in collaboration with the Field Museum.

Yolanda Keahey (April Mini-Intensive 2021) is a newly appointed librarian in the Special Collection department at the Jersey City Free Public Library. Her focus is working with underrepresented groups to document and collect their stories and experiences in the city. As a lifelong resident of the city it brings her great pride to work on this initiative. She earned a Master's in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute and Master's in Business Administration from St. Peter's College.

Yvette Ramirez (OHSS Intensive 2016): Born and raised in Queens, NY, Yvette Ramirez is an arts administrator, community educator and multi-media artist. She is inspired by the arts as a social agent that can build and empower communities as well as bring about transformative justice and healing. Currently she is the program coordinator for The Laundromat Project. In the past, she has organized alongside Latino and working class communities via Make The Road NY and New Immigrant Community Empowerment and as a fellow with the Center for Neighborhood Leadership. In addition, she has worked as an arts education assistant at The Noguchi Museum as well as alongside artist Sol Aramendi via Project Luz. She holds a BA from Hunter College in Romance Languages and Political Science where she studied past and present social movements in Latin America. As a daughter of Bolivian immigrants, she is interested in exploring identity based politics, the meaning of “home,” memory, and patriarchy through her art practice.

Zahari Richter (Fall Mini Intensive 2019) Zahari Richter is an Autism Spectrum transfeminine English PhD student at GWU in Washington DC who grew up in Connecticut. Zahari enjoys hiking in the woods and punk rock in their spare time and loves studying disability community and Beat poetry for their research.

Zahra Crim (OHSS Intensive at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies 2023) finds that audio is a love letter signed by two things they're incredibly fixated on: oral history and folklore. Drawing on their experience as a multiracial Black person, they're currently threading the connection between family history, myth, and what it means to be seen. Zahra is especially interested in the memories that haunt us and the ways they linger. They graduated from Vassar College (BA in International Studies) and has worked with the Asian American Writers' Workshop, StoryCorps, and, most recently, Getting Curious. Zahra considers both South (Georgia + Florida) and Chinatown, NYC, their home.

Zoe Dutka (OHSS Intensive 2015) is originally from Shokan in the Hudson Valley, but has lived in a very rural region in Venezuela, on the border of Brazil, since she was 17. She currently works as a journalist for the news site venezuelanalysis.com, where she closely tracks Latin American politics and social crises.