Faculty News Spring 2024
Catch up with our faculty!
After twelve years deeply engaged in teaching OHMA students, for the 2024-25 academic year OHMA Director Amy Starecheski will be on sabbatical leave.
We are thrilled to announce that OHMA core faculty member Nyssa Chow will serve as Interim Director.
Nyssa Chow has been a beloved member of OHMA’s faculty since 2019, teaching courses on Multimedia Storytelling and our core Roots and Branches of Oral History course. She is also an OHMA alum — her thesis, an immersive literary oral history project, won the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Her creative and teaching practices focus on the intersection of art and oral history; embodied knowledge and listening; and literary oral history.
Born and raised in Trinidad, she holds an MFA from Columbia University’s Film program in addition to her OHMA degree. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University; she is the Lead Artist Facilitator for the 2021 and 2024 DocX Labs at The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, co-created with Stephanie Owens and Martine Granby. She was the 2019-2021 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2018 recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein for Literary Oral History. Chow has collaborated with filmmakers and artists, most recently with Jennifer Wen Ma, on her exhibition ‘An Inward Sea’ for the New Britain Museum of Art. Her solo exhibition ‘Still. Life.’, a series of installations using sound, light, and assemblage, was held at Gallery One in Trinidad. Her artwork Trace: A Memorial was featured in the group exhibition ‘How We Remember’ (2021) at the Miriam and Ira D Wallach Art Gallery in New York City. Her work will be featured in ‘Re-collections’(2024), an upcoming exhibition hosted by The LatinX Project. She has conducted oral histories on behalf of arts institutions such as the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Mott Haven resident Nieves Ayress sharing her stories at a Mott Haven Stories of Activism event
During her sabbatical year — with the support of a Community and Cultural Resilience Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Lecturer Professional Development Grant from Columbia University — Amy will work with the Mott Haven History Keepers and other Bronx neighbors to learn more about ways of doing oral history that are not grounded in university spaces. As part of that research she will be the Anthropologist-in-Residence at the Bronx County Historical Society for the year. She will also spend time as a Visiting Scholar at Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, to learn more about how university-based oral history programs can be accountable to and engaged with broad constituencies, including students, faculty, and community members.
Sara Sinclair, who teaches our Indigenous Oral Traditions and Anti-Colonial Oral Histories course, just completed work in her role as Director of the Aryeh Neier Oral History Project for Columbia’s Center for Oral History Research. Her work on the project included a 12 session interview with Aryeh Neier himself, which comprises over 400 pages of his reminiscences.
In addition, “You Were Made for this World,” an Indigenous authored anthology of letters for young people, that she co-edited with her sister Stephanie, will be coming out July 29, 2024 (Tundra/Penguin Random House) - stay tuned!
Nicki Pombier, who co-teaches our Serious Play: Oral History and the Art of Story class, is a collaborating artist on File/Life, which has received the 2024 Large Institution Award: Honorable Mention from the National Council on Public History and The Kimmel Family Accessible Experience Award, presented by Art-Reach. File/Life is a community-led creative exploration of the Pennhurst archives by seven archivists, all people with disabilities and/or family members, including two former Pennhurst residents. These community archivists share stories that made them listen, feel, imagine, and remember. In doing so, they ask the question: Can a file ever contain a life?
File/Life is now installed in its third location, in the Helix Gallery at Thomas Jefferson University, where they're working with a group of medical humanities students to plan forthcoming public programming. Details here.