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.

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. 

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.

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 nonprofit development professional 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! 

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.

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.

Clarissa Shane (2023)

Clarissa Annabel Shane is an interdisciplinary creative from Stockton, CA. She graduated with a BA in Humanities, the Arts, and Social Thought from Bard College Berlin. Receiving an OSUN Experimental Humanities Grant allowed her to do multimedia research in Paredones, Michoacán, Mexico on human/nonhuman entanglements - how wild plant usage in ceremony, medicine, and cuisine impacts cultural traditions and environmental conservation. While advocating for solidarity building and civic engagement in the past, Clarissa was a Humanity in Action Fellow, a National 4-H Conference Youth Leader, and a California 4-H State Ambassador. In the future, she plans to study health and herbalism as a de-colonial practice.

Samantha Sacks (2023)

Samantha (she/her) is a classical ballet dancer interested in art and culture as a means of understanding contemporary issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the past year she has been working in Puerto Rico as a gallery assistant, museum intern and company dancer.

A Chicago native, she grew up dancing ballet at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, where she became involved in a cultural exchange called “Cuba y Chicago.” In the year before college, she enrolled as a full-time student at the Escuela Nacional de Ballet in Havana. These experiences have sparked and continued her interests in cultural production in the Caribbean, arts in service of nation building and in postcolonial studies more broadly. Her work in Puerto Rico has deepened her desire to continue researching and amplifying the stories of Caribbean and Latin American artists.

While at OHMA, Samantha is excited to continue exploring the fields of dance and migration studies, collecting stories from dancers belonging to the Caribbean diaspora. Upon returning to New York she looks forward to building new connections with Latino cultural organizations in the city. 

Samantha graduated summa cum laude from Columbia with a B.A. in Comparative Literature & Society. For her senior thesis, she collected and analyzed stories of emigrant Cuban dancers to explore how the body, displaced from its country of origin, remembers, rejects, and reinterprets national identity through dancing.

Bernadette Bisbing (2023)

Bernadette Bisbing is from the Philadelphia area. She grew up as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults). American Sign Language (ASL) was her first language growing up. She has had a life-long interest in learning and comparing visual and audial communication methods. She prefers to use the term “shared history” over “oral history.”

Bernadette graduated from Temple University with her B.A majoring in History and Political Science focusing on “Third-World History” and “International Politics” as her main areas of study. She minored in Art and Latin American Studies. Later she graduated from Temple University with her M.A. in History with Soviet History as her specialized area of study. After graduating from Temple, she worked in various non-profit jobs and customer service jobs until she decided to pursue ASL-English interpreting. After working with Deaf and Deaf-Blind students for a few years she has decided to return to her first academic love - History. Most recently she has been researching police brutality in in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Outside of work and studying, Bernadette enjoys running. She has completed 27 marathons and hopes to join the 50-state marathon and half marathon clubs. She is nearing the half way mark with 24 states crossed off the list. Besides running she enjoys yoga, lifting weights, and hiking. She is an avid nature enthusiast and is also is an animal enthusiast. She often pet sits cats and dogs and currently has three cats.

Laurie Germain (2023)

Laurie (they/them) is a Haitian-made, African-grown, non-binary cultural worker. They grew up moving around Southern and Eastern Africa before moving to the United States at the age of fourteen, where they attended boarding school in Rhode Island. Laurie graduated from NYU in 2019 with a bachelor's degree in Global Liberal Studies, a concentration in Politics, Rights, and Development, and a 40 page thesis analyzing the way anti-blackness exists and functions in the relationship between Haiti and Jamaica.

Laurie believes that growing up in different countries is part of what has made them a storyteller: learning from an early age how to observe, to listen, to take the time to understand the narratives that give explanation to culture and reason to experience. A writer and artist, they believe that their most honest and impactful work, at its core, is also a study of self. By going inwards, Laurie has been able to unravel a body of work that stems from their center: 2NDGENders, a multimedia home and living archive for trans and gender dynamic (TGD), second generation immigrants to gather at the intersections of our stories.

Laurie is what Gloria Anzaldúa would call a nepantlera, meaning, their assignment within nepantla is to aid others through it, to hold the space as they unravel the particularity of navigating identities from multiple borders and many betweens. They are leaning into the role of nepantlera and griot for their community: the role of diasporic historian, record keeper of deaths and rebirths, preserver of queer genealogies, and witness to stories. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Laurie can be found in conversation with other TGD second generation immigrants in their day to day life and on the 2NDGENders Podcast.

Eric Gaither (2023)

Eric Gaither is an oral history practitioner; studies intellectual and cultural history, or the history of ideas; and the history of science. His projects imbricate oral and written language(s) of communities of color and immigrants in the U.S. South to explore orature and (visual) narrative possibilities at the intersection(s) of English and heritage languages other than English.

He also interrogates digital ontologies and archival and curatorial language practices that promote erasure and algorithmic bias, obfuscate epistemological outcomes, and disrupt public and private access to content generated by and/or about Black, Indigenous, and historically and legally Black-adjacent people(s). 

Eric is a member of Phi Alpha Theta, history academic honor society, and is a Jacob K. Javits fellow-alum, in the discipline of history.