In November of 2015, Jeffrey H. Brodsky, OHMA alum, announced a generous cash prize of $3000 for an outstanding capstone/thesis. The criteria for receiving the award is that the capstone/thesis must “make an important contribution to knowledge and exemplify the rigor, creativity and ethical integrity we teach our students.” For his own thesis Jeffrey conducted over 60 hours of videotaped interviews with politicians on their memories of their first campaigns. He created a video documentary based on his interviews, one of the first multimedia theses in our program, and was advised by OHMA co-founder Peter Bearman.
This year, our fifth awarding this prize, we had an exciting and varied pool of theses and capstones to consider. We are proud to announce the winner, Holly Werner-Thomas, and runner up, Christina Barba. Both of these works have made unique and innovative contributions to oral history theory and practice. We are excited to share them with the world and honor the hard and important work of these emergent oral historians. Click here to view the full announcement.
Winner | THE 40% PROJECT: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America & The Survivors: A Documentary Play
by Holly Werner-Thomas
Thesis Co-Advisors: Amy Starecheski and Andrew Bragen
In this capstone, Holly Werner-Thomas demonstrates the potential of combining art, oral history, and activism to contribute to the critical public political discussions of our time. The centerpiece of her capstone is a work of documentary theater – The Survivors – which weaves together edited oral history transcripts to tell a broad and yet deep story of the often-invisible impacts of gun violence on Americans. Building on a tradition of interview-based documentary theater, from Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror to Tectonic Theater’s Laramie Project, Werner-Thomas does something innovative: she does not rely on the structure of the interview to structure the piece, nor does she rely on the body of a single performer to bind together disparate points of view. She puts the narrators directly in conversation with each other, using juxtaposition to create dialogue between people impacted by gang violence, suicide, domestic violence, and other crime. The Survivors is one of many actual and future outcomes of The 40% Project, and in her larger work Werner-Thomas shows skill in building dynamic connections between project design, research, and advocacy goals. Her work exemplifies the power of oral history to challenge and transform the public world in the tradition that Jefferey Brodsky established through his oral history thesis. For these reasons, we have selected her as the winner of the 2020 Jeffrey H Brodsky Oral History Award.
Runner Up |Living in the Shadow of the Armenian Genocide by Christina Barba
Thesis Advisor: Amy Starecheski
Christina Barba’s powerful six minute forty-one second film show us how her family has passed down their experience of the Armenian Genocide from her grandfather, to her mother, to her and her child. In her own words, this work “makes tangible the concept of post-memory.” In this powerful work of theoretically-informed art, Barba weaves together archival photos, her mother’s oral history, and an archival interview (from the Shoah Visual History Archive) of her grandfather being interviewed about his experience while her mother watches. Barba first showed this work at OHMA’s 2019 Inter/Views exhibit, where she invited guests to watch the film while eating her mother’s pahklava, and then share their impressions in a guest book. This simple presentation made a tremendous impact on exhibit visitors. The tight connection between intention, form, and content makes Christina Barba’s work stand out as exceptional, and led us to name her as the runner-up for the 2020 Jeffrey H Brodsky Oral History Award.