A.V. Wayans (2025)

A.V. Wayans is a New York native and Brooklyn-based visual artist, anthropologist, and oral historian whose work bridges the disciplines of illustration, ethnographic writing, and griot tradition. Rooted in observation, her hand-drawn imagery uses contour lines to create form and texture, offering a nuanced lens of the world around her. Often paired with narrative text, A.V.’s work integrates ethnographic methods and interview-style reflections to center the voices and experiences of her narrators.

Her practice foregrounds the challenges of her community, highlighting socio-economic disparity, class, gender, race, faith, and health. Through this interdisciplinary approach, she invites viewers to join her in spaces of empathy, dialogue, and deep cultural reflection, aiming to foster community through shared stories and the arts. 

Having obtained her M.A in Oral History from Columbia University, A.V’s thesis, “When You’re Hurting | When You’re Healing”, is an extensive body of work that showcases the stories of four Black women in NYC in 2016. Documenting their oral histories from 2020 to 2026, A.V unpacks how hurting and healing are not absent from one another. The thesis aims to encourage integrational conversation amongst Black women to dismantle the unhealthy practice of silencing in her community. 

A.V is currently using her background in arts education to create a curriculum that combines visual arts practice and reflective writing with somatic stretching. The purpose of this workshop is to give Black women the opportunity to experience art, reflect on their relationship with their bodies, and engage with healing practices through a physical practice. 



Sophia Blake (2024)

Sophia Blake is a writer, actor, and musician based in New York City. She is originally from Salem, MA and spent four years in Illinois earning her BA in Theatre and History from Northwestern University, before moving to New York to pursue theatre and music. Her thesis work at OHMA centered on the day jobs of artists in New York and the lives that they are able to build around them. Storytelling is at the root of all that she does and she is passionate about finding new ways to understand and communicate facets of the human experience.

Isabella Love (2025)

Isabella is an oral historian, photojournalist, and writer hailing from the controversial beast that is the state of Florida. She completed an undergraduate degree in History at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. During her time at the University of Central Florida, she worked at multiple Veteran-based nonprofits, participating in both archival and oral history projects. She first worked with the VA-sponsored Veterans Legacy Program, where she worked in archival research to preserve the history of fallen soldiers buried in Florida cemeteries. From there, she discovered a love of oral history working with the Veterans History Project, interviewing Central Florida Veterans of U.S. Wars to record in the Library of Congress. 

Kaitlin Cochran (2025)

Kaitlin Cochran is a mental health advocate specializing in how unique kinds of cognition play a role in how one engages with grief. She completed her undergraduate study in Philosophy, with an emphasis in ethics, at the University of Puget Sound. During her academic career she is focused on isolation theory as well as embodiment's role in life through different modalities. 

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. 

Ekta Shaikh (2024)

Ekta Shaikh is a Pakistani oral historian and interdisciplinary researcher working across feminist anthropology, gender studies, and public/digital humanities. Her work explores how women navigate space, memory, and everyday violence across Karachi and New York, with particular attention to domestic life, transit, and the infrastructures that shape intimacy and belonging. She experiments with form—oral history as sound, installation, and interactive archive—building participatory projects that invite publics into practices of listening, address, and care. Going forward, she will continue developing collaborative oral history work with women across both cities, expanding her multimodal methods and public-facing research practice.



Hilary Seeley (2023)

Hilary Seeley (she/her) is an oral historian, multi-disciplinary artist, and scholar based on Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). She earned her MA in Oral History from Columbia University and 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. She analyzed the ways in which people express their experiences through art and what those works 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 visual, tactile devices to communicate personal identities and arcs and to place characters’ stories and behaviors in a larger framework of social and historical dynamics.

Spearheading The Cultural Histories Project, Hilary has shared this priority of telling stories and their meanings through her oral history work with elders for nearly 20 years. She engages material culture in many of her interviews to unlock gateways to memory and establish comfortable spaces. Hilary’s recent oral history work expands perspectives of and methods for memory work. Her master’s thesis project, "Heirlooming: Rethinking Memory and Relationality through Embodiment and Collapsed Time,” proposes a decolonial, inclusive intervention into the standard scholarly practice of oral history and invites others to invest in slow, deep, connective memory work. Hilary was the oral history fellow on the Carnegie Corporation Oral History Project at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, an oral historian for the Voices of Lefferts “Whose Streets? Our Streets! Remain, Reclaim, Rebuild” Oral History Project, and is currently working on the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Oral History Project at Incite Institute. In her free time, Hilary enjoys practicing various art forms, including dancing (Lindy Hop, Charleston, Balboa, solo jazz, ballet, dancehall) and making jewelry, clothing, pysanky, paintings, and embroidery.

Avantika Seth (2024)

Avantika Seth is an oral historian, filmmaker, and educator working across film, archives, and storytelling to explore memory, silence, and belonging. She holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia University, where her work focused on family oral history, ethics of care, and embodied listening practices. Her thesis film, Will You Remember What I Choose to Forget?, examines memory and intergenerational care through intimate oral histories created within her own family. Avantika has led and contributed to multiple oral history projects, including work on Afghan refugee resettlement in Iowa, the 1947 Partition Archive, and archival research at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. With a background in journalism and documentary filmmaking, she brings a trauma-informed, ethically grounded approach to oral history across audio, video, and exhibition formats.

Tejan Green-Waszak (2023)

Tejan Green Waszak, Ph.D is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing Studies and Rhetoric at Hofstra University. She previously lectured in the University Writing Program at Columbia University. Her research interests include Caribbean literature and culture, postcolonial literary studies, writing studies, performance studies, poetry, and oral history. She is co-editor of the anthology Idea of the Human (2016).


Samantha Sacks (2023)

Samantha Sacks is a classical ballet dancer, oral historian, and arts worker born and raised in Chicago. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature and an M.A. in Oral History from Columbia University, where her ongoing research uses oral history to ask how the body expresses and transmits memory through dance. She has cultivated relationships with artists across New York, Cuba and Puerto Rico, collaborating on research, writing, and public programs with a range of arts institutions. She is the Researcher and Special Projects Coordinator at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Education Center and a company dancer with the New York Theatre Ballet. 

Sarah Maacha (2024)

Sarah Maacha is a multidisciplinary artist and oral historian whose work explores grief, memory, displacement, and care through a decolonial praxis. Rooted in oral history ethics, her research centers relational methods of witnessing, refusal, and embodied memory, with an emphasis on multimedia storytelling and experimental forms. 

Laurie Naitha Germain (2023)

Laurie is a Haitian-made, African-grown, Brooklyn-based, cultural [&] memory worker. With their collaborators, they explore questions around queer diasporic experience under the intention of  [remembering] [imagining] pathways towards personal and collective liberations. As a writer and artist, they know that their most honest & impactful work, at its core, is also a study of self. As an oral historian, they work with the oral history encounter, and the archive generated from it, as prompts for creative reflection through mixed mediums. Based in Brooklyn, they can be found in conversation with their community in their day to day life, and on the 2NDGENders Podcast. Laurie is a 2023 OHMA Future Voices fellow and 2024-2025 Artist in Residence with Haiti Cultural Exchange.


Yuri Fujita (2024)

Yuri Fujita is an oral historian and journalist. She joined Columbia University’s Oral History Master’s Program (OHMA) after thirteen years at NHK, Japan’s largest public broadcaster. As a political correspondent, she reported on major policy debates and government decision-making, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, and conducted interviews with policymakers and public officials. Working in broadcast journalism led her to reflect on how much lived experience remains outside formal documentation. She pursued oral history to expand her listening and storytelling approach. 

Yuri’s thesis project at OHMA draws on oral history interviews conducted in Brighton Beach, one of the largest post-Soviet diasporic communities in the United States. She listened to individuals’ accounts of navigating uncertainty shaped by war, displacement, legal vulnerability, and political shifts. Her work focuses on close attention to language, power, and representation across cultural contexts, and by a commitment to listening practices that hold stories without forcing resolution.

Kortney Nash (2024)

 Kortney Nash (she/her) grew up in South Los Angeles and presently resides in the Jersey suburbs. Kort received her bachelors of arts from University of California, Berkeley with a major in interdisciplinary studies where she focused on child development and education policy. With her minor she pursued creative writing, and she now engages in all of these disciplines by working in children’s publishing.  

When not editing books at work, Kort can be found writing. She has short stories featured in The Black Girl Survives in This One (Flatiron Books 2023), What Rides at Night (Microcosm Publishing 2025), and Afrofuturism Short Stories (Flametree 

Publishing 2025). Her debut picture book, Tell Me About Juneteenth, came out in 2025. 


Sage Foster-Lasser (2023)

Sage Foster (she/her) is an oral historian from Texas based in Brooklyn. Her work braids together psychoanalysis, oral history, and visual culture to ask questions about listening, narrative, and memory. She has assisted with artist interviews and research for galleries, museums, and other arts organizations such as Hauser & Wirth and the Archives of American Art. Sage has co-authored three children’s books with Magination Press, and is in the early stages of co-authoring a book about listening for clinical practitioners.

Cleo Z. Cui (2024)

Cleo (Zhiming) Cui is a freelance illustrator and part-time translator/editor based in Beijing. She has a background in state-run institutions, having interned at CCTV and the National Museum of China. Cleo also worked as a full-time editor at Luxopus publishing house, where she published one translation work and has another awaiting review. Spending most of her life in Beijing, she observed and gathered stories of how the younger generation adapts to the cultural and social nuances of this city and the broader “collective”. This observation led her to explore how social norms and “unspoken” criteria impact the younger generation since the founding of the PRC.

Cleo received her bachelor’s degree in art history from Pitzer College, focusing on contemporary Chinese artists in the diaspora during the 1980s. She furthered her education by obtaining a Masters degree in postwar East Asian history from Kings College London. With her writing-based background, she seeks to develop different approaches at OHMA to record and document stories, continuously exploring the formation of “popular norms” in modern Chinese society and how the youth struggles to pattern after these trends to fit in.

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.