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.

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.