Destry Maria Sibley

Affiliations

• Adjunct Faculty, Multimedia Storytelling

Destry Maria Sibley is an oral historian, media producer, and literary scholar. 

She brings to OHMA a decade of experience as a digital media producer for networks including WNYC Studios, Magnificent Noise, TED, Panoply, and the Google News Lab. In 2017, she was named a Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storyteller for her oral history research on the Children of Morelia, a group of child refugees of the Spanish Civil War in Mexico. An excerpt of the story was featured on The New Yorker Radio Hour in 2021 after Destry won WNYC’s national podcast accelerator competition, and, in 2023 her manuscript received the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History from PEN America. Currently, Destry is the Senior Producer of Esther Perel’s award-winning podcast Where Should We Begin? 

Destry holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center (CUNY), where she was a Provost Enhancement Fellow. She has been the recipient of additional fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, Humanities New York, and the Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar. 

She has previously taught in the English Departments of Lehman College and The City College of New York, where she received the Humanities Teaching Award from the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts, and has served as an Education Fellow with the New York Public Library.

Destry is looking forward to working with OHMA students to explore Multimedia Storytelling as a genre and craft. Her course will introduce students to a variety of narrative forms, approaches, and strategies that oral historians employ to shape and disseminate their research. Throughout the semester, students will closely analyze the many creative choices that multimedia storytellers make to develop a narrative whole and will practice creating narratives based on their own research across a variety of media forms.