Emily Weitzman (2024)

Emily Weitzman is a writer, educator, performer, and interdisciplinary artist from New York. She is a lecturer in the Undergraduate Writing Program here at Columbia University, where she teaches courses focused on writing about film and performing arts.

In 2024, Emily wrote and first performed a one-person show, Furniture Boys, which premiered off-Broadway at SoHo Playhouse and was a finalist in the SoHo Playhouse Lighthouse Series. The show blends theater, comedy, clown, spoken word, recorded interviews, and interdisciplinary art, examining the immortality of inanimate objects and the mortality of relationships, asking the question: How to have faith in the structural integrity of a chair, a person, an artistic project, a self? Through OHMA, she hopes to approach this project from a different and unique perspective, using the lens of oral history to look at furniture as the physical embodiment of the close spaces we occupy and the relationships to others in those spaces.

Emily has taught, performed, and connected to artists all over the world. She was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to conduct a yearlong project collaborating with performance poets in Nepal, India, New Zealand, Australia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Italy and Ireland. She has conducted interviews for writing projects to midwives at an all-female medical clinic in Mombasa, Kenya; to cyborg artists performing in Barcelona, Spain; to poets from the Word Warriors who experienced the devastating 2014 earthquake in Nepal; to writers and artists around the world. Emily has received fellowships for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Adirondack Center for Writing. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Longreads, Boulevard, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, HuffPost, the Kathmandu Post, and HAD. She was a finalist for the Sewanee Review Contest in nonfiction and fiction, the Disquiet Literary Prize in nonfiction and fiction, and the Iowa Review Nonfiction Award. 

In 2020, Emily completed an MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia University, where she was awarded a teaching fellowship. She graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in English, creative writing, and dance. This summer, she studied physical theater and clown with the Pig Iron School, and performed her show in New York City and Canada. Emily sees her writing, teaching, performing, and art-making as inextricably linked. In addition to teaching writing at Columbia for the past six years, she has connected to hundreds of students at different life stages—from teaching second grade to high school English, from working with young writers at Writopia Lab, to undergraduates at NYU, to poets around the world. Emily is excited to join OHMA and to implement oral history practices into her classroom, her work, and her art! 

Sarah Maacha (2024)

Born in Morocco, Sarah Maacha’s life spans chapters in Marrakech, Johannesburg, New Delhi, Malta, New York, and Paris. These experiences deeply influence her work, which explores the intersections of identity, belonging, and global and local narratives. 

A graduate of the African Leadership Academy, where she first delved into storytelling's power to shape Africa's future, Sarah has built on this passion through her academic and professional endeavors. She graduated magna cum laude from Skidmore College, majoring in International Affairs with a minor in Documentary Storytelling. Her academic and creative work often focuses on colonialism and orientalism’s impact on her home city of Marrakech. 

Professionally, Sarah has diverse experience in creative consulting, project management, and strategic communications, including her role as Maghreb Project Manager & Consultant for Frieda, overseeing locally-led post-earthquake initiatives. Her contributions extend to various international organizations, such as the African Leadership University, the Obama Foundation, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean. Since then, she has engaged in numerous programs to expand her knowledge and practice. Some of these include: Taqafiat (professional program on art and culture as a pillar for soci-economic development) Trauma of Money (trauma informed course on financial literacy and wellbeing) and Hood Herbalism (herbal education by/for BIPOC communities). 

Creatively, Sarah’s work engages with themes of identity, memory, and diasporic experiences, exploring the convergence of the political and personal. Her first short film contrasts Morocco's image in the tourist imagination with her own complex identity as a Moroccan abroad, while her first performance piece delves into her identity as a Muslim woman in post 9/11 America. These works demonstrate her commitment to challenging societal binaries and fostering communal healing. 

The merging of research-based work and creative expression is where Sarah finds the most joy. Her practice is characterized by its interrogation of societal binaries and her commitment to community healing and introspection. After her studies abroad, Sarah spent four years back in her home city of Marrakech reconnecting with its community of artists, researchers, her family and friends, and her cat (Paco). 

Zahra Crim (2024)

Zahra Crim is a multiracial interdisciplinary audio producer and editor. Zahra earned a bachelor of arts in International Studies from Vassar College, pairing Black and Indigenous political social movements and familial memory with multimedia production. In 2022, Zahra was chosen by the Association of Independents in Radio to be a New Voices Scholar. Zahra has produced, edited, and reported for podcasts and radio programs across the country, including for The Texas Standard, KUT, KUTX, Getting Curious, and StoryCorps. 

Zahra's work recently prioritized the stories of various international Indigenous communities, including producing and/or reporting stories that feature an Inuk microbiologist on arctic diets, a Kānaka Maoli scholar on the role of ice in Hawaiʻi, and interviewing Black Seminoles in Texas about their relationship to Juneteenth. Zahra continues to trace oral histories' relationship to folklore—with a focus on Indigenous horror, afrofuturism, and magical realism—as a way to understand and underscore the silences found in marginalized and/or diasporic communities' narratives. Zahra also focuses on the power dynamic between higher education + museums and the physical material preserved in their exhibits and archives, looking toward accessibility and consent. 

Cleo Z. Cui (2024)

Cleo (Zhiming) Cui is a freelance illustrator and part-time translator/editor based in Beijing. She has a background in state-run institutions, having interned at CCTV and the National Museum of China. Cleo also worked as a full-time editor at Luxopus publishing house, where she published one translation work and has another awaiting review. Spending most of her life in Beijing, she observed and gathered stories of how the younger generation adapts to the cultural and social nuances of this city and the broader “collective”. This observation led her to explore how social norms and “unspoken” criteria impact the younger generation since the founding of the PRC.

Cleo received her bachelor’s degree in art history from Pitzer College, focusing on contemporary Chinese artists in the diaspora during the 1980s. She furthered her education by obtaining a Masters degree in postwar East Asian history from Kings College London. With her writing-based background, she seeks to develop different approaches at OHMA to record and document stories, continuously exploring the formation of “popular norms” in modern Chinese society and how the youth struggles to pattern after these trends to fit in.

Jace Chen (2024)

Jace (they/them) was born and raised in New York. They received their BA from NYU in 2022, where they majored in comparative literature with a minor in linguistics. Through their studies, they developed a strong interest in the intersection of history and language. And how there are historical influences to why we say what we say, hidden implications in the words we choose, and regional influences on the cadence and rhythm at which we speak.

Storytelling has always been a point of interest for them. During college, they founded a multimedia publication called Pier To with a fellow classmate. Their mission statement revolved around amplifying and uplifting their generation’s voices through person-first narratives. After a year, the publication had a team of around 40 staff members who worked on marketing, digital development, print development, and literary and creative editors/curators. Pier To concluded with the release of its print issue, which showcased a diverse range of original works from around 20 artists.

Their interest in oral history begins at home, where they speak Shanghainese with their family. This Chinese dialect has no formal written language, and its practice is diminishing in Mainland China. This conflict has influenced their current research interests to focus on subjects of language diaspora, immigrant history, and linguistic anthropology.

Carter King (2024)

Carter S. King | La’yahawise (he/him) is a performance scholar interested in the intersections of material culture and performance studies, which has largely been informed by his practice as a costume designer and as an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation. Carter is particularly interested in how a decolonial performance studies can engage with oral history methodologies to explore the performativity of makers and artists, as well as bring to light the performativity of objects and other facets of material culture.

Carter’s work as a costume designer has primarily focused on historic indigenous—specifically Oneida—dress and costume can function in live performance, exhibit spaces, and as speaking their own histories. Within his professional experience as a costume designer, he has designed for two celebrations of the Oneida Nation’s Bicentennial, the Oneida Treaty Signing (2022) and Oneida Bicentennial (2023), alongside historic costume consultations for exhibitions and television. Concluding his B.A. in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at Yale University, Carter wrote his thesis on historic Oneida dress.

Carter’s background in costume design, art-making, and performance studies has brought and fueled his interest in oral history, storytelling, and the importance of indigenous oration in the development of indigenous performance studies. His interest in how indigenous artist’s voices coincide with the power of their artwork pushed his work with Oneida community members and elders to share their expertise to develop a dialogic, oral relationship to his scholarship and analysis of object performance.

With this in mind, it’s Carter’s hope to continue this exploration of oral history as an aspect of indigenous performance and a critical methodology pertaining to material cultures while at OHMA.

MacLain Naumann (2024)

MacLain Naumann (he/him) is a comedian, writer, educator and performer who—while coming to OHMA from Upstate New York—is first and foremost the self-proclaimed original Midwestern Princess (his apologies to Chappell Roan). As a scholar, MacLain is primarily focused on the ways in which comedy, culture, and storytelling can be used to influence public policy, promote social progress, and elevate the voices of those often silenced by systems of oppression. 

MacLain started his career in Saint Louis, Missouri, working as a writer and editor for a local NBC news affiliate. As a broadcast journalist, he was responsible for coordinating interviews and finding diverse stories that amplified the needs and wants of the community. These experiences sparked his passion for collecting and amplifying first-person narratives. 

In 2022, MacLain left the Midwest and returned to the world of competitive speech and debate as the Director of Speech at Cornell University. A three-time national champion himself, he has trained young advocates in the art of public speaking and storytelling as it relates to public policy. In collaboration with his students, he has helped to facilitate advocacy initiatives that have addressed the rampant misdiagnosis of PCOS, analyzed the community impacts of infrastructure justice in Buffalo, New York, and collected books for incarcerated scholars. MacLain loves helping students discover the power of their own voice to create change in the world.

While at OHMA, MacLain is excited to continue exploring the fields of comedy, culture and class—documenting the narratives of queer, disabled and otherwise marginalized workers who have turned to comedy and performance as a means of survival under capitalism. 

Asha Sydney Burtin (2024)

Asha Sydney Burtin is a singer-songwriter who grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. She earned her bachelor’s degree in music production at Rider University in New Jersey, with a double minor in African American studies as well as gender and sexuality studies. During her time in undergrad she took advantage of opportunities to shed light on the plight of Black American people, specifically Black women, such as being a recurring panelist at her university’s events surrounding gender, culture, sexuality and race.

During her time in undergrad she also had the opportunity to be an intern at Smithsonian Folkways, the Smithsonian Institution’s non profit record label, in which she had the task of cataloging metadata for a wide array of albums from both the U.S. and abroad.

As an aspiring oral historian she is interested in finding the ways that music and oral traditions connect in order to build and strengthen community. As a Black American and a creative, she is continuously interested in amplifying marginalized voices in order to shed light on stories and perspectives that she believes deserve to be heard and shared.

Yuri Fujita (2024)

Yuri Fujita joins the program with a journalistic background. She has over 13 years of experience reporting for NHK, Japan’s largest broadcasting network. As a political news reporter, Yuri covered pivotal decision-making processes, including those during the COVID-19 pandemic. She engaged in numerous conversations with policymakers to gain deep insights. Often, these stories were "off the record," which led her to realize the importance of passing meaningful stories to the next generation and sparked her interest in oral history. She now aims to capture nuanced and complex stories "on the record" despite the challenges of convincing people to participate in such interviews.

Yuri's sensitivity to language, social norms, and identity has been honed through diverse cultural experiences. She spent most of her life in Japan, both in Tokyo and rural areas such as Aomori. Her early years in Portland, Oregon, and a year studying abroad at Bates College exposed her to diverse perspectives. She profoundly values these experiences and is excited to see what comes next in her journey.

Avantika Seth (2024)

Avantika (She/Her) developed a passion for storytelling through her grandmother's tales of grief and longing, spending her childhood in the Himalayan region of India. This early exposure sparked her fascination with recording life stories. Starting in journalism, Avantika wrote for renowned magazines and served as the India Correspondent for France 24, covering tragic events like Indonesia's devastating Tsunami in 2018. Her journey led her to write for the Los Angeles Times and later into documentary filmmaking, collaborating with channels such as Channel News Asia, Arte, France 2, M6, and Al Jazeera.

Her profound connection to oral history emerged when she documented the stories of over 100 survivors of the Partition of India (1947). She contributed to a documentary film and the 1947 Partition Archive through these interviews. Her encounters with mass migration victims awakened similar themes of stories she had heard as a child, revealing the power of oral history in capturing trauma and grief.

As a professional for the past eight years, she has recorded various narratives encompassing family histories, migration, trauma, violence, disasters, and human rights. Recently, she ventured into communication for the development sector, utilizing oral history to document stories of resilience. She also imparts training to leading non-profits in India, teaching the ethical collection of impactful stories. In her last project, she conceptualized and wrote a family history book on the life history of a renowned industrialist and social worker in North-East India. Apart from this, she is building an archive on the loss of her grandfather, documenting generational trauma. The ongoing project has been exhibited at the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and the India International Centre.

With an educational background from prestigious Indian institutions like the University of Delhi and the Asian College of Journalism, she has cultivated a growing interest in psychology. She holds a certificate in Narrative Therapy from the Dulwich Centre. Outside work, she indulges in portrait photography, creative writing, dancing, and volunteers at a suicide prevention helpline.

Kortney Nash (2024)

Kortney Nash (she/her) grew up in South Los Angeles and presently resides in the Jersey suburbs. Kort received her bachelors of arts from University of California, Berkeley with a major in interdisciplinary studies where she focused on child development and education policy. With her minor she pursued creative writing, and she now engages in all of these disciplines by working in children’s publishing.  

When not editing books at work, Kort can be found writing short stories. She was recently featured in the YA horror anthology The Black Girl Survives in This One, and she has a picture book titled Tell Me About Juneteenth coming out in 2025. In her writing, Kort draws inspiration from the tradition of afro-futurism and she hopes to find a way to introduce this to her oral history praxis. 

Ekta Shaikh (2024)

Ekta Shaikh is a Pakistani anthropologist and gender studies scholar with a concentration in South Asian studies from Grinnell College. Before joining the Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program, she spent two months in her hometown of Karachi as a Projects for Peace recipient. During this time, she served as a developer and organizer of workshops with the local transgender community, focusing on dance and mental health. Ekta also received the Jeanne Burkle Award at Grinnell College for her pedagogical contributions to the Gender Studies major.

As an undergraduate, Ekta worked as a research assistant on Shuchi Kapila’s book "Learning to Remember," which ignited her passion for decolonial thought and memory studies. Through the OHMA program, she is continuing her exploration of migrant precarity, refugees, and transnational feminist thought.

Purva Panday Cullman (2024)

Purva is an organizer who has served in a range of leadership roles at community, national and international social justice organizations and movements. She has worked at the intersection of gender, culture and activism with Girls Inc of New York City, the Lower East Side Girls Club, the Ms. Foundation for Women and, for the past 20 years, V-Day, the global movement to end violence against all women, girls, gender expansive people and the planet.

In partnership with grassroots women in their communities, Purva has conceived and developed dozens of programs, trainings, convenings, global campaigns, demonstrations, testimonials and cultural events about issues related to violence against women and girls. She has also co-led rapid response strategies for women in disaster zones like Haiti and post-Katrina Gulf South and provided strategic support to safe houses for women and girls whose bodies and futures are under attack, such as Maasai girls escaping Female Genital Mutilation in Kenya.

Purva helped create and open the City of Joy, a leadership center for survivors of sexual violence in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, where an ongoing regional war over conflict minerals has left hundreds of thousands of women and girls raped and tortured, resulting in devastating injuries and trauma. The center – conceived and led by Congolese activists and survivors on the ground – provides intensive group therapy, life skills training and unfettered care to 90 women for six-month periods; its creation is chronicled in the Netflix documentary City of Joy.

A throughline of Purva’s work has been uplifting women and girls’ stories and creating opportunities for them to share their testimonies. While at OHMA, Purva hopes to use oral history as a tool for advocacy and community healing.

Purva graduated cum laude with a BA from Barnard College in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures. She earned an MS Ed from Bank Street College in Early Adolescent Education. In 2018, Barnard College awarded her the Millicent Carey McIntosh Award for Feminism.

Purva lives in Brooklyn with her husband, filmmaker Sam Cullman, and their two school-aged children.

Feyiṣayo Aluko (2024)

Feyiṣayo Aluko is an award-winning, multi-disciplinary artist hailing from Nigeria. She is best known for her audio poem Aisha which won the 2023 Independent Audio Fiction Award at The Tribeca Film Festival and her spoken word performances at numerous places including the Radio City Music Hall and the Lincoln Centre.  

Her work lies in the intersection between spoken and written language. She uses a blend of poeticism, oral history and music to create auditory experiences that explore themes of colonialism, migration, loss of language and womanhood. She received her BFA in writing from Pratt Institute where she focused on poetry and fiction. She is excited to dive deeper into the world of oral history at Columbia.

Sophia Blake (2024)

Sophia Blake is an actor, organizer, and creative living in New York. She is originally from Salem, MA and spent four years in Illinois earning her BA in Theatre and History from Northwestern University. During her undergraduate career she took part in student theater both on stage and off as a community engagement and outreach director. The 2020 presidential primary took her to Iowa, where she worked as an organizing fellow on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, and later as the student organizer for Northwestern’s campus.

Storytelling is at the route of all that she does, from theatre-making, to social media creation, to historical research, and beyond. She is so excited to expand upon this passion through her work at OHMA!

Otherwise, she enjoys spending time with her cat, decorating cakes, and taking long walks around the city!

Tejan Green-Waszak (2023)

Tejan Green-Waszak (she/her) is a cross-genre writer and educator originally from Mandeville, Jamaica. She lectures in the University Writing Program at Columbia where she is also the co-director of the Readings in Race and Ethnicity cohort. Her research interests include Caribbean literature and culture, Black diaspora studies, postcolonial literary studies, performance studies, and poetry. As a researcher, creative writer, and educator, she is excited for the opportunity to further develop skills that can strengthen her approach in incorporating oral history in the classroom and in her research.

Hilary Seeley (2023)

Hilary Seeley (she/her) has lived in Brooklyn for nearly a decade by way of Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Paris, and Santa Fe, NM. She received her BA from UC Berkeley in Interdisciplinary Studies--a self-designed major examining expressive culture in the 19th and 20th centuries through the study of art, design, film, literature, linguistics, history, sociology, and anthropology. Specifically, she analyzed the ways in which people express their experiences through art and what those pieces tell us about socio-political forces and the human condition. Hilary applied this knowledge and perspective as a high school teacher of English, French, and History, and eventually in her career in costuming for film and television. Specializing in period productions, she uses clothing, accessories, and props to tell a character’s personal state, experience, and arc in addition to their temporal and geographic settings; racial, ethnic, and cultural background; socioeconomic status; and values and challenges. She uses these devices to place characters’ stories and behaviors in a larger framework of social and historical dynamics, with the primary objective of communicating the stories and symbolic significance of these nonverbal cues.

Hilary has shared this priority of telling stories and what they mean in an oral history project she spearheaded 17 years ago, wherein she interviews elders to capture primary source perspectives and details about the eras through which they lived. Using material culture to unlock the gateway to detailed memories and establish comfortable spaces, her goal is to assemble a comprehensive mosaic representative of diverse voices and to convey a sense of value to folks who have been historically quieted or sequestered. Hilary is looking forward to expanding and deepening this project and connecting with more communities through her work in OHMA.

In her free time, Hilary enjoys various art forms, including dancing (swing, ballet, dancehall) and making jewelry, clothing, pysanky, paintings, and embroidery; spending time in nature; and going to comedy shows.

Ananya Garg (2023)

Ananya Garg (she/her) is an educator, writer, visual artist, and oral historian. She was trained in oral history methodology under the guidance of Dr. Priti Ramamurthy during her undergraduate education in the Department of Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. 

Ananya has completed several oral history projects including contributing to the University of Washington’s Department of Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies 50th anniversary oral history archive, an oral history project of queer and trans people of color, and most recently as part of the Museum Education Fellowship Program at the Brooklyn Museum, a project interviewing alumni of the museum’s teen programs. She has been deeply moved by the experience and reciprocity of giving and receiving stories within her community.

Ananya enters OHMA to complete an oral history project sharing the stories of queer and trans South Asian people about how they are building chosen family networks. 

You can find Ananya’s writing published or forthcoming in YES! Magazine, The Asian American Feminist Collective, The Shade Journal, The Asian American Writers Workshop, and elsewhere. A queer South Asian woman, Ananya lives in Brooklyn, NY with her partner and dog. When she’s not looking to hear or tell a good story, Ananya can be found doing ceramics, printmaking cards for her chosen family, and drinking hot chocolate or lemonade, depending on the season.

Olivia Hurtado (2023)

Olivia has spent the majority of her life in New Jersey, where she grew up and calls home. Since 2018, she has lived in Michigan, completing her Bachelor’s degree in philosophy and Spanish at the University of Michigan. During her years studying, she worked in the university’s writing center as a writing consultant for her peers. Simultaneously, and perhaps in the tradition of her parents, lifelong hospitality workers, she has also worked in a variety of food service jobs, currently serving and bartending in a fine dining restaurant.

She brings to OHMA an interest in studying the restaurant by way of oral history. Observing and talking to restaurant patrons from behind the bar and working alongside restaurant staff in the front and back of house, she has met people with manifold backgrounds and aspirations with whom she never may have interacted in the classroom. 

She is thrilled to learn about the history and practice of oral history in general and especially as it presents an opportunity to merge what she has learned in and out of the classroom (and create something new from it!)

Sage Foster-Lasser (2023)

Sage Foster (she/her) is an aspiring oral historian from Texas living in Brooklyn. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied psychology and American Studies. During that time, she co-authored a series of children’s books based on principles of positive psychology and child development. Some of her current research interests include friendship studies, spatial identity and placemaking, community craft, relational communication, and play. Sage is interested in the ephemerality of collecting oral histories, and loves thinking about the nooks and crannies of a conversation. She is excited to explore oral history as a mode of collective knowledge-making and community care. She also likes reading park bench dedications, collecting miniature things, making silly charts, and poems about food.