Renka Aiba (2023)

Renka Aiba has been seeking to intersect fashion journalism with oral history from the perspectives of material culture and its diversity in modern society.

Grew up in Tokyo, Japan, one of the biggest cities in the world stuffed with people, she find her curiosity on the streets where numerous lives are crossing and producing cultures; for example, non-standard words, vigorous daily activities, interaction through fashion, and murmur that is unintentionally spoken.

After working as a street interviewer for a fashion web magazine in 2019, she developed an interest in the influence of fashion culture on the relationships between society and people. In 2020, when she was in her second year of Keio University, she joined an oral history seminar and started an oral history project to collect personal stories of fashion and expression in the modern society of individualism and consumerism. Her graduation project compiled 30 narratives that are collected in her 3 years of research.

As she changes her research location from Tokyo to New York, she is currently exploring editorial and creative output for her continuous project in narratives in the field of fashion.

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. 

Christine Stoddard (2023)

Christine Stoddard is a Salvadoran-American writer, director, artist, filmmaker, and theatre-maker whose work spans experimental, journalistic, academic, and commercial fields. In June 2023, Brooklyn Magazine named her one of the Top 50 Most Fascinating People in Brooklyn. She was the inaugural artist-in-residence at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House and previously developed videos and other educational materials for the Art Deco Society of New York. Her award-winning drama "Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares" will open at The Tank in September.

She founded Quail Bell Press & Productions, known for Quail Tales sketch comedy, the Badass Lady-Folk podcast, Quail Bell Magazine, and more. The author of fiction, poetry, art, and history books, Stoddard has contributed to The Huffington Post, Bustle, Cosmopolitan, Native Peoples, Yes! Magazine, and other publications. Her book Hispanic and Latino Heritage in Virginia was the topic of her 2021 keynote talks at Old Dominion University and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Her arthouse feature Sirena's Gallery is distributed by Summer Hill Entertainment and her short Bottled is streamable on Amazon Prime. Her music video "De Colores (Chorus of Melancholy)" won Best Experimental Project at the 2023 Latino Film Market. 

Born to a Salvadoran mother and American father, Stoddard graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University and holds an MFA in interdisciplinary art from The City College of New York. Her CCNY thesis related to her personal, racial, and cultural identity as shaped by El Salvador’s civil war. This includes research on the Indigenous genocide that precipitated the war and her maternal ancestry from the Mayan Pipil tribe.

Shuai Dang (2023)

My name is Dang Shuai, and I come from Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, China. 

Before joining the Oral History program at Columbia University, I interned at the Cui Yongyuan Oral History Center at the Communication University of China.

Since 2019, I have been involved in oral history interviews with Chinese Radio Broadcasters & the Development of Radio Broadcasting. During this process, I have gained a deep understanding of the importance of the interviewer's listening in oral history and how the interviewer's words, emotions, psychology, and actions affect the interviewee's oral narrative. I want to pursue further research in this area.

In 2020, I participated in an oral history interview with the "Encyclopedia Scholars" organized by the Encyclopedia of China Publishing House. In the process, I felt the love and passion of these scholars for their profession. This has inspired me to take up oral history work so that more people, especially ordinary people, can tell and share their stories.

Next, I will use oral history to study how cultural heritage and mass media influence people's collective memory.

Kangni Wang (2023)

Born in a faraway rural town in Hunan, raised amidst the vibrant immigrant city of Shenzhen, and educated in Beijing, the political and cultural epicenter of China, I have been spending the past 22 years exploring and redefining my identity. While my unique background has made it for me difficult to fit into predefined categories, it has also cultivated within me the ability to accept and empathize with all types of people, whether they belong to the marginalized or the mainstream. This is a product of my upbringing and education in a variety of socioeconomic and cultural contexts.

Being educated and working as a journalist during college years, I have spoken with and interviewed a wide range of people, from top executives of state-owned companies to young depressed people, cleaning ladies, young and old mechanic workers, and small restaurant operators struggling to make a living in the big city. I enjoy having conversations with and learning from such individuals because of the insight their words provide into the experiences and perspectives that have molded not only them but also the world in which I live.

With a foundation in journalism, I come to OHMA with a zeal to begin the media practice as an oral historian. I aspire to bring the subtleties back to narratives, to reintroduce the nuances that often go unnoticed, and to give voice to the unheard.

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.

Romy David (2023)

Romy David joins OHMA by way of Los Angeles and New York. She spent her undergraduate years at the George Washington University in Washington, DC which sparked her interest in politics and media. After graduating and interning at the Obama White House, she became an Associate Producer at MSNBC, where she focused on booking guests and finding unique voices to amplify the time’s most important stories. Wanting to expand into longer form storytelling, Romy transitioned to the documentary space, joining an evolving project on the tea industry and all its characters and corruption. Her main interests lie in sharing first person narratives that reflect structural policies and political decisions. Romy hopes to use these stories to impact real change and is thrilled to further this mission at Columbia and beyond.

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.

Maya Gayer (2023)

Maya Gayer is a program manager, content editor and creator with a vast professional experience in the media field. Her main mission and expertise is making academic knowledge accessible to the general public.

Based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, Maya has worked for the past decade as a senior director of programming and content editor at GLZ Radio (a public station with one of the largest audiences in the country). She served as editor-in-chief of “The Broadcast University”—one of the station’s flagship programs, in which top Israeli scholars deliver lectures and are interviewed in series dedicated to subjects such as democracy, the climate crisis, feminism, religion and state, and immigration. She is also the co-editor of the program's book series. As senior director of programming at GLZ, she was responsible for the Holocaust Remembrance Day broadcasts. Preserving and shaping collective memory in this framework has ignited her initial interest in oral history.

In the past few years, Maya also established and directed the Persitz Program in Arts Management in the Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality and was head content editor of the science documentary series “The Future is Already Here” aired on KAN (the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation). Additionally, she taught radio and podcast production at Sapir Academic College and the University of Haifa.

Maya holds an MA magna cum laude and a BFA summa cum laude in Film and Television studies, from Tel Aviv University. Maya was awarded the Fulbright fellowship in Public Humanities to pursue an MA in Oral History, through which she aspires to find new ways to tell stories, spread knowledge and promote cultural creation for a more humanistic and liberal society in Israel.

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 studies the intellectual and cultural history of the United States, the history of science, and is an oral history practitioner. He focuses on artifacts and narratives emanating from and/or referencing the U.S. South, particularly southeastern coastal states and the southwestern borderlands. 

An avid collector of rare grammar manuals, which document language varieties spoken in the South during the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Eric also researches the centrality of regional vernaculars and languages other than English in local history. 

He explores archival and curatorial language practices that promote algorithmic bias; shape 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. 

Gloria Mogango (2023)

« Gloria Victoire » my name and middle name that mean “glory” and “victory” my mom always give us name to my brothers and sisters that would give us the power to keep going through trials and bring to life their meaning. Born in 2001 in France, I lived all my life at the rhythm of ballet school, school and family. But after a leg injury, I decided to explore the world of art and the human being through a double degree in art history and anthropology and graduated in June 2022. During this master year, I want to focus on the transmission of music in African societies, through griots and tales and the intellectual property, especially case of plagiarism of known songs with traditional and indigenous songs. 

Since my youngest childhood, I have been immersed in orality. Indeed, the culture of my parents has always been transmitted orally through songs, tales and myths. The very history of my family is perpetuated orally. My culture was constituted in orality, stories, legends, everything was lived, spoken and told.   

Coming from a family of 5 brothers and sisters, it has always been difficult for me to make myself heard and to send my ideas. It's very hard to talk about your day when 5 people are talking at the same time as you during the meal.

This is why orality and more specifically oral history is important to me, it took me many years to realize that my voice also had an impact. I want everyone to have the opportunity to make his voice and what he or she wants to express, heard. It was by realizing that my words could also have an impact that I began to use this to make my ideas heard. Orality is a founding instrument of our societies long before they were even formed. Long before having writing, people already had a history, ways of thinking and traditions.

By joining the 2022 cohort OHMA, I want to highlight oral history, contribute to the promotion of oral archives, so that they are as used and recognized as any existing material evidence. I will learn oral history theory and method that will prepared me for future research. 

Ambar Johnson (2022)

Ambar Johnson (she/hers) is an urban and transportation planner, media producer, and creative composer with oscillating origins along the east coast. 

Her philosophy that time travel and transportation are one of the same orients her thinking and approaches to people, projects, and perspectives. She comes to OHMA to layer and weave urban planning, oral history, and nature to move people — sonically, physically, emotionally, and temporally.

Ambar’s project involves documenting her favorite past time: road trips (regardless of mode) as a vehicle for storytelling. She plans to tell an oral history of I-95 as a timeline and roadmap about what this place means (or place/meant coined by Amiri Bakara) to flora, fauna, and families (including her owns) across generations and geographies I-95 spans. By bridging (oral) history and transportation she hopes to do three things:

 1) delicately unravel something that impacts us all — how we get around 

2) to restore continuity in families histories and 

3) ensure processes and plans in the planning realm are rooted in rich, regenerative practices and histories.

In a world that rushes to move quickly across time, space, and schedules, Ambar aims to use her time in OHMA to travel slowly and listen closely to the people and environments around her. 

She received a B.S. in History, Technology, and Society from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. https://www.ambarjohnson.com/

Aya Taveras (2022)

Aya is from the Manhattan Valley neighborhood bordering Columbia's campus and brings an intimate awareness of how stories of impacted communities can be obfuscated or viewed through a prism of stereotype.

Aya began her career as a middle school English Language Arts teacher and currently works as Director of Story and Representation at Perception Institute where she interrogates how implicit bias, identity anxiety, and stereotype threat can emerge in the media landscape.

She hopes to learn how to leverage oral history as a means of redistributing power to communities that have often been excluded from storytelling tables.

Leigh Pennington (2022)

Hailing from Richmond Virginia, Leigh Pennington has lived, worked, and studied around the world. She earned her BA in Anthropology, Art History, and Religion from Concordia University in Montreal. Recently she moved back to the United States after earning her Masters degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jewish Studies. 

Leigh started in the field of oral history in Israel as a consultant for the Ethiopian National Project. The project unites global Jewry, the Government of Israel and the Ethiopian-Israeli community in its mission to advance the integration of Ethiopian Jews into Israeli society. Leigh developed the website for the project’s main oral history initiative, Project Ti’ud. In addition to this she also curated interviews with Ethiopian Jewish immigrants from the 80s and 90s and edited the same interviews for the purposes of publishing documentation. 

When Leigh was living in Montreal she became fascinated by First Nations and Inuit history, art, spirituality, and culture. As a practicing and Torah educated Jew she noticed the similarities between Indigenous and Jewish history. At Columbia she hopes to explore some of these connections and historic community crossovers to a fuller extent in hopes of sparking more interfaith and spirituality solidarity between Indigenous groups in the United States/Canada and American Jews.

Currently Leigh works as a freelance culture content writer as well as an Op-Ed editor for the Times of Israel. Her writing has been published in major news and opinion media such as Quebec Heritage News and Tablet Magazine.