Marygrace Waller (2025)

Marygrace Waller is a writer, community organizer, photographer, and zinester originally from Menlo Park, California. She attended UCLA for her undergraduate studies where she earned a BA in European Languages and Transcultural Studies, focusing primarily on European film, music, and other media, and she also earned a minor in Music Industry. While at UCLA, she worked for the UCLA Library Special Collections and University Archive where she was a member of the UCLA Punk Collective, a group of UCLA Library employees dedicated to the preservation of Angeleno punk history. As an undergraduate, she interned with a Los Angeles entertainment industry public relations agency. She also founded a music and arts collective through which she organized weekly mutual aid and music events.

She fell in love with oral history after reading Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” and Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen’s “We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of LA Punk.” She has since conducted oral histories on several music scenes in and around Los Angeles and interviewed countless bands and photographers. She is passionate about the preservation of alternative and feminist perspectives in music and social movements and is looking forward to continuing to explore these subjects at OHMA.

Isabella Love (2025)

Isabella is an oral historian and writer hailing from the controversial beast that is the state of Florida. She completed an undergraduate degree in History at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. During her time at the University of Central Florida, she worked at multiple Veteran-based nonprofits, participating in both archival and oral history projects. She first worked with the VA-sponsored Veterans Legacy Program, where she worked in archival research to preserve the history of fallen soldiers buried in Florida cemeteries. From there, she discovered a love of oral history working with the Veterans History Project, interviewing Central Florida Veterans of U.S. Wars to record in the Library of Congress. 

Isabella also specializes in fashion history, with much of her academic work revolving around streetwear fashion from the 1990s to current day. Her focus in these projects relate to the idea of “copycat” fashion, as well as the role Black streetwear designers have played in the current aesthetics of luxury brands. She is immensely grateful and excited for the opportunity to explore further into this topic in one of streetwear’s most notable epicenters, New York City. 

Vanessa Martinez (2025)

Growing up in South Florida, Vanessa was exposed to the rich and colorful stories brought forward by hispanic communities. Her parents, each from their own Latin American countries, wove culture and tradition into the fabric of their daily lives. Having spent their 20’s working on cruise ships and traveling the world, her parents’ home became a revolving door of friends and family from all different countries. It was here, amid the clinking of coffee cups and the hum of layered accents, that her curiosity for people took root.

That same curiosity eventually led her on her own adventures. As she began to travel, work on cruise ships, live in other countries, and make her way into homes and kitchens far from her own, she continued to develop her passion for people with diverse backgrounds and the common humanity that is often at the route of their stories. With her degrees in fashion design and international business, she’s combined her love for creativity with her instinct for connection. Her travels, her volunteer work with the elderly, and her creative projects have all revealed the same truth: a desire to find and form community and to honor the stories that knit people together.

Vanessa continues to chase those stories: the ones whispered across kitchen tables, traded on long train rides, exchanged through tears and laughter, or carried across oceans. 

She believes that every person is a living archive, and she’s determined to keep immersing herself in their pages. 

Kaitlin Cochran (2025)

Kaitlin Cochran is a mental health advocate specializing in how unique kinds of cognition play a role in how one engages with grief. She completed her undergraduate study in Philosophy, with an emphasis in ethics, at the University of Puget Sound. During her academic career she focused on embodied cognition’s role in disability philosophy and phantom limb syndrome. 

Outside her work in mental health, Kaitlin enjoys spending time working at her local humane society: applying what she has learned about human cognition, anxiety and grief to improve the lives of shelter dogs. 

Kaitlin also brings an audio engineering background to her work in oral history - she has worked on the set of multiple live broadcasts and television shows. Combining her skills in capturing sound with a focus on recording  stories seemingly untold, her work aims to change the face of public opinion to foster a more inclusive society.

Myer Rosenblum (2025)

Myer (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based memory worker, facilitator, crisis counselor, and community gardener.

With over 9+ years of experience in organizing, facilitation, and nonprofit management, Myer’s work is primarily rooted in direct, hands-on community care—including LGBTQ+ suicide de-escalation and crisis counseling, abortion access case management, abolitionist arts education, and neighborhood-based food sovereignty.

Myer began collecting oral histories as a senior in high school, interviewing elders at their hometown community center. In the intervening years, Myer has woven together narratives across a wide range of lived histories, documenting stories and leading collaborative workshops with residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in Richmond, VA, teens in juvenile detention, and trans millennials coming of age on the internet (among others).

In pursuit of libratory ways to repurpose the archive as a community resource, Myer has returned to memory work over the last year and a half. Their current projects include a collection of pre-2000 images of top surgery scars, an investigation of the trans nude across art history, and a digital archive of 1990s–2000s transgender/transsexual personal webpages.

While at OHMA, Myer plans to continue their practice of memory as a tool for social change, uplifting themes of trans identity, bodily autonomy, and speculative archives.

Myer holds a B.A. in American Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Richmond, where they were awarded the prestigious Oldham Scholarship and graduated Summa Cum Laude. They currently live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which sits on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Lenape people.

Caitlin Hawke (2025)

Caitlin Hawke (she/her) earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in French and Archaeology. She spent several seasons excavating in the southwest of France studying the Upper Paleolithic era and cave art. Her career to date has been focused on public health, first on infectious diseases and then on aging. Currently she is the Associate Director, Programming, at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, a university-wide center based on Columbia's medical campus. There she builds interdisciplinary aging research networks among university scientists. She has worked as a community organizer in her Upper West Side neighborhood of Bloomingdale and is fascinated by the history of Bloomingdale and of its progressive, grassroots organizations, businesses and residents. In no particular order, her favorite hobbies include family genealogy, occasionally contributing to the West Side Rag, and the study of Bob Dylan.

A.V. Wayans (2025)

A.V. Wayans is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and writer whose work bridges the disciplines of illustration, anthropology, and storytelling. Rooted in observation and lived experience, her hand-drawn imagery uses contour line to shape form and texture, offering a nuanced lens on the world around her. Often paired with narrative text, A.V.’s work integrates ethnographic methods and interview-style reflections to center the voices and experiences of everyday individuals. Her practice foregrounds the complexities of the human experience, engaging themes of socio-economic class, gender, race, faith, and health. Through this interdisciplinary approach, she invites viewers into spaces of empathy, dialogue, and deep cultural reflection, aiming to connect communities through shared stories and visual inquiry.

Alia Taqieddin (2025)

Raised across the West Coast with roots in Syria, Palestine and Jordan, Alia is an audiophile of diverse mediums. A longform audio producer, DJ, and music producer-in-training, she enters OHMA with a curiosity to explore sound as a medium for storytelling, particularly among survivors of state violence.

Professionally, Alia is a grant writer and freelance audio producer. She received her undergraduate degrees in Public Health and Interdisciplinary Studies, where she was awarded a competitive, yearlong field research grant in the former autonomous zone of Exarcheia in Athens, Greece. Her multimedia work can be found at KALW Radio, a San Francisco-based NPR affiliate public radio station; the Arab American National Museum’s Oral History Archives; Arab.AMP, a MENA arts incubator in Oakland, and Mizna Journal, among others.

Alia believes that audio can be a powerful tool in the pursuit to dispel mis- and disinformation, and is excited to explore these questions through oral history at OHMA.

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). 

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.