Feyiṣayo Aluko (2024)

Feyiṣayo Aluko is an award-winning, multi-disciplinary artist hailing from Nigeria. She is best known for her audio poem Aisha which won the 2023 Independent Audio Fiction Award at The Tribeca Film Festival and her spoken word performances at numerous places including the Radio City Music Hall and the Lincoln Centre.  

Her work lies in the intersection between spoken and written language. She uses a blend of poeticism, oral history and music to create auditory experiences that explore themes of colonialism, migration, loss of language and womanhood. She received her BFA in writing from Pratt Institute where she focused on poetry and fiction. She is excited to dive deeper into the world of oral history at Columbia.

Sophia Blake (2024)

Sophia Blake is an actor, organizer, and creative living in New York. She is originally from Salem, MA and spent four years in Illinois earning her BA in Theatre and History from Northwestern University. During her undergraduate career she took part in student theater both on stage and off as a community engagement and outreach director. The 2020 presidential primary took her to Iowa, where she worked as an organizing fellow on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, and later as the student organizer for Northwestern’s campus.

Storytelling is at the route of all that she does, from theatre-making, to social media creation, to historical research, and beyond. She is so excited to expand upon this passion through her work at OHMA!

Otherwise, she enjoys spending time with her cat, decorating cakes, and taking long walks around the city!

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.

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. 

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. 

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).