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 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. 

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. 

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.

Florencia Ruiz Mendoza (2022)

Florencia is from Mexico City. She has worked and advocated against forced disappearance in Mexico as a researcher, lecturer, and activist in Mexico and the United States for more than almost two decades. She collaborated with organizations such as the History Memory Project at John Jay College/CUNY, the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Latin American Network at the International Sites of Conscience. Florencia has taken for several years creative writing courses at The Writers Studio and at Gotham Writers where she completed her full-length memoir about immigration. Her literary work has been featured in Los Acentos Review and Restless Immigrants Workshop Blog. ​ She is a reader for The Masters Review where she looks avidly for stories from underrepresented writers. She holds a BA in History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and was a Columbia University Human Rights Advocate in 2009 and an OHMA Summer Fellow in 2010.​​

Florencia’s research interest is focused on Native American National Monuments in the Southwest, the Borderlands, and American collective memory. ​Also,​ she is interested in documenting the stories of those who suffered forced disappearance in Mexico and its borders, as well the  searching journey of those who love them.

Jeary Payne (2022)

Jeary Payne (He/him) is a multi disciplinarian artist, telling stories and creating art across mediums. Based in Brooklyn, NY by way of Phoenix Arizona. He currently serves as an associate educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where he oversees the museum's Teen Programs. As an artist and educator he believes that nothing done without passion is ever done for long. He has been dedicated to exploring innovative ways to support and enhance the learning experience through the arts and education for young people . He received a bachelors of Interdisciplinary Studies, focusing on music and business from Arizona State University (Class of 2010). 

As a photographer, he is interested in documenting scenes that capture the nuance, micro moments of Black life and experiences of real people. Through the program, he's interested in exploring Black collective memory, the intricate dynamics of being a transplant in a gentrifying Brooklyn as it relates to building community as well archiving and mapping his own history by discovering who his late mother was through the stories and recollections of those who knew her well. 

Michael Giannetti (2020)

Michael Giannetti is a Michigan native, growing up in Bloomfield Hills just north of Detroit. In 2020, he graduated from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied US history, political science, and Africana studies. Michael’s research interests are in 20th century US history, specifically the Long Civil Rights Movement and the organizations, figures, and ideas that came out of that period. Moreover, he is strongly interested in public history, museum studies, and oral history. He is greatly interested in the role museums and historical sites play in connecting movements from the past to present day. Michael aspires to become a stronger oral historian and looks forward to gleaning new techniques and strategies from the incredible faculty and students at Columbia. He is exceedingly excited to meet everyone in the 2020-2021 OHMA cohort and looks forward to getting to work!

Supriya Kotagal Wheat (2020)

Supriya Kotagal Wheat is a New York City-based educator and vintage jewelry curator.

Supriya began her teaching career in 2007 as a Teach for America Corps member. Since then, she has served as a New York Hall of Science Design Fellow & Master Teacher, a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow in Creative Writing, and a Works on Water Artist in Residence. In 2017, Fund for Teachers awarded her a grant to document in photos and film youth-led initiatives to curb climate change in the island nations of the Maldives and Zanzibar. She currently teaches a life science course at the School at Columbia.

Supriya arrives at the field of oral history from multiple paths and perspectives. In 2020, Supriya launched Pearl Vintage, a small boutique specializing in preowned pieces that span the past century. Through her work collecting and curating vintage jewelry, Supriya has become incredibly interested in documenting the stories behind heirlooms and found objects. She believes these precious items are a physical manifestation of memories, sentiment, and histories waiting to be told. As both a science educator and curator, Supriya is principally interested in interrogating and documenting human relationships with their surroundings, be they environmental or material.

Supriya received a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and International Studies from Emory University (2007) and a Master of Science in Teaching from Pace University (2010). 

Claire Thu Anh Le (2019)

I’m Claire Thu Anh Le, a social justice advocate from Vietnam. I graduated from Oberlin College this year with double History and Gender, Feminist & Sexualities Studies majors and a minor in East Asian.  Positioning myself in a queer, feminist, post-colonial perspective, I am interested in exploring the interlocking systems of oppression away from/critical of Western influence, under the specific context of Vietnam’s unique geographical and historical position throughout its development.

In 2015, I founded Human Library Vietnam, one of the biggest student-based social advocacy NGO in Vietnam. Through a series of oral history events, my team and I create a public platform marginalized groups to reclaim their agency, share their perspectives on avoided issues and situate themselves in the centre community’s consciousness. In my commitment to oral history as a tool medium for memory and changes, I hope to be able find uniquely Vietnamese first-person narratives that map out paradigms of individual and institutional histories.

I look forward to meeting and engaging with our wonderful, insightful cohorts. Hopefully, I will come out from the program as an oral historian with a clearer sense of method and purpose.

Kaoukab Chebaro (2019)

Kaoukab Chebaro currently serves as the Head of Global Studies at the Columbia University Libraries. She previously served as Associate University Librarian for Archives and Special Collections at the Libraries of the American University of Beirut, and as the Islamic and Middle East Studies Librarian at the Columbia University Libraries. Kaoukab has served on numerous Library, archives and cultural heritage committees in or about the region. She has also served as the PI for the NEH-funded Palestinian Oral History Archive (2016-19). Kaoukab is interested in oral history as a tool at the service of expanding the politics of knowledge production and representation, specifically around the Global South, the Middle East, and human rights.