Shuai Dang (2025)

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.

Olivia Hurtado (2025)

Olivia has spent the majority of her life in New Jersey, where she grew up and calls home. Since 2018, she has lived in Michigan, completing her Bachelor’s degree in philosophy and Spanish at the University of Michigan. During her years studying, she worked in the university’s writing center as a writing consultant for her peers. Simultaneously, and perhaps in the tradition of her parents, lifelong hospitality workers, she has also worked in a variety of food service jobs, currently serving and bartending in a fine dining restaurant.

She brings to OHMA an interest in studying the restaurant by way of oral history. Observing and talking to restaurant patrons from behind the bar and working alongside restaurant staff in the front and back of house, she has met people with manifold backgrounds and aspirations with whom she never may have interacted in the classroom. 

She is thrilled to learn about the history and practice of oral history in general and especially as it presents an opportunity to merge what she has learned in and out of the classroom (and create something new from it!)

Kangni Wang (2025)

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.

Romy David (2025)

Romy David joined OHMA by way of Los Angeles and New York. She completed her undergraduate studies at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, where her passion for politics and media first took root. After graduating and interning at the Obama White House, she became an Associate Producer at MSNBC, focusing on booking guests and amplifying unique voices to spotlight the era’s most important stories. Driven by a desire to delve into longer-form storytelling, Romy transitioned to the documentary space before pursuing her Master’s degree at OHMA. Her thesis examined the lived experiences of two women navigating barriers to abortion access, demonstrating the power of personal narratives to humanize political discourse, evoke empathy, and inspire advocacy for reproductive justice. Romy’s work focuses on sharing first-person narratives that reveal the real-life consequences of political decisions, and she is committed to using storytelling to drive meaningful change.

Maya Gayer (2025)

Maya Gayer is a journalist, content editor, and program director with over two decades of experience in the media field.
Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Maya has spent 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 the editor-in-chief of The Broadcast University, one of the station’s flagship programs, which hosted top Israeli scholars for talks on a wide array of topics. Maya created 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 station's Holocaust Remembrance Day broadcasts. Preserving and shaping collective memory in this framework sparked her initial interest in oral history. In recent years, Maya established and directed the Persitz Program in Arts Management at the Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality and was the head content editor of the science documentary series The Future is Already Here, which aired on KAN (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. She was awarded the Fulbright Fellowship in Public Humanities to pursue an MA in Columbia University’s Oral History Program. For her thesis project, she created an oral history archive of the Israeli Democracy Protest Movement, the largest grassroots movement in Israeli history, which operated through 2023 in response to the government's attempts to overhaul the judicial system.

Through interviews with more than 20 of its leading organizers, the archive aims to preserve the history of this pivotal moment in Israeli society and contribute to the study of democratic backsliding and civil resistance, offering a critical case study for other societies facing similar challenges. The archive is intended to be preserved in the Israel National Library and the Judaica and Hebraica Collections at Stanford University.

Leigh Pennington (2022)

Hailing from Richmond Virginia, Leigh Pennington is an Op-Ed Editor for the Times of Israel and a freelance arts and culture journalist. She earned her BA in Anthropology, Art History, and Religion from Concordia University in Montreal and her Masters degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jewish Studies. Her writing has been published in major news and opinion media including Tablet Magazine, the Times of Israel, and Up Magazine.

Gloria Mogango Alumbi Ma Ekonzo (2023)

Gloria Victoire is a Congolese-born French scholar and oral historian with a deep passion for exploring cultural identity within the African diaspora. Raised in France, Gloria has always navigated between different worlds—her Congolese heritage and the French culture she grew up in. She earned a dual degree in Art History and Anthropology, and later pursued a Master’s degree in Oral History at Columbia University. Her current project, "Am I My Culture’s Keeper?", delves into the complexities of cultural preservation, belonging, and the transmission of heritage among African diasporic communities. Gloria’s work is deeply influenced by her own experiences of navigating identity, tradition, and self-expression, making her a powerful advocate for the preservation of oral histories and cultural legacies.

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 recently worked as Director of Story and Representation at Perception Institute where she interrogated how implicit bias, identity anxiety, and stereotype threat can emerge in the media landscape. She now works as the Director of Community at Cinereach.

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.

Clarissa Shane (2023)

Clarissa Shane is an interdisciplinary creative and oral historian from Stockton, CA. She graduated with a BA in Humanities, the Arts, and Social Thought from Bard College Berlin where she did multimedia research in her maternal ancestral land: Paredones, Michoacán, Mexico on human/nonhuman entanglements – how wild plant usage in ceremony, medicine, and cuisine impacts cultural traditions and environmental conservation. Clarissa continued working with these themes as she created a Paredones Plant Oral History repository for her Oral History Master’s thesis. During her time in NYC, she also collected plant knowledge from community Gardeners for the New York Botanical Garden’s Bronx Foodways Oral History Project. In her free time, she studies Ayurvedic herbalism and is committed to Land Justice initiatives. clarissa.shane.edu@gmail.com

Florencia Ruiz Mendoza (2022)

Florencia Ruiz Mendoza is from Mexico City. She has been and advocate against forced disappearance for almost twenty years. She initiated her career documenting state crimes for the Historical Report Qué no Vuelva a Suceder, acknowledged as Patrimony of Memory.

She collaborated for the Historical Memory Project at John Jay College/CUNY, the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Latin American Network at the International Sites of Conscience.
Her literary work has been featured in Los Acentos Review and Restless Immigrants Workshop Blog. She is a reader of color for The Masters Review. 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.

As an OHMA alumnus and Oral Historian, she lectures in Mexico on Oral History and Human Rights.

Vy Luu (2021)

Vy Luu (she/her) was born in Vietnam and raised in San Diego, California. She is interested in contributing the stories of those who have been at the margins to our understanding of history, particularly the stories of the Vietnamese-American community. Before OHMA, Vy received her B.A. in Sociology with Honors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University. Beyond oral history, she is currently the Senior Manager of Learning and Technology at Murmuration, where she teaches organizations how to use data and technology to amplify their civic engagement efforts.

Ambar Johnson (2022)

Ambar Johnson (she/hers) is an urban and transportation planner, media producer, and creative composer with oscillating origins along the east coast. 

Her philosophy that time travel and transportation are one of the same orients her thinking and approaches to people, projects, and perspectives. She comes to OHMA to layer and weave urban planning, oral history, and nature to move people — sonically, physically, emotionally, and temporally.

Ambar’s project involves documenting her favorite past time: road trips (regardless of mode) as a vehicle for storytelling. She plans to tell an oral history of I-95 as a timeline and roadmap about what this place means (or place/meant coined by Amiri Bakara) to flora, fauna, and families (including her owns) across generations and geographies I-95 spans. By bridging (oral) history and transportation she hopes to do three things:

 1) delicately unravel something that impacts us all — how we get around 

2) to restore continuity in families histories and 

3) ensure processes and plans in the planning realm are rooted in rich, regenerative practices and histories.

In a world that rushes to move quickly across time, space, and schedules, Ambar aims to use her time in OHMA to travel slowly and listen closely to the people and environments around her. 

She received a B.S. in History, Technology, and Society from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. https://www.ambarjohnson.com/

Renka Aiba (2023)

Renka Aiba has been seeking to intersect fashion journalism with oral history from the perspectives of material culture and its diversity in modern society.

Grew up in Tokyo, Japan, one of the biggest cities in the world stuffed with people, she find her curiosity on the streets where numerous lives are crossing and producing cultures; for example, non-standard words, vigorous daily activities, interaction through fashion, and murmur that is unintentionally spoken.

After working as a street interviewer for a fashion web magazine in 2019, she developed an interest in the influence of fashion culture on the relationships between society and people. In 2020, when she was in her second year of Keio University, she joined an oral history seminar and started an oral history project to collect personal stories of fashion and expression in the modern society of individualism and consumerism. Her graduation project compiled 30 narratives that are collected in her 3 years of research.

As she changes her research location from Tokyo to New York, she is currently exploring editorial and creative output for her continuous project in narratives in the field of fashion.

Yu Cui (2022)

Yu Cui, TV news anchor, journalist, PR consultant, and now, oral historian; variety made his day.

Made in Dalian, designed in Beijing, he was raised in a household where a pair of wise businesspeople cultivated him to be both ambitious and generous. He fights to make this world a better place.

He reads, films, paints, writes. Last month, one post of his on Weibo has 650 thousand views.

Ask him to “carpe diem” together, lifestyle is Yu’s field of expertise. He became the youngest team leader in Ruder Finn Communication Group (Beijing) when 23 years old, offering strategic consulting to global brands, including TISSOT, IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN, MONTBLANC, TENCENT, BENTLEY, New World China, and Sino-Ocean Group. Since always, he lives, instead of making a living.

Gym rat, advanced open water diver, Krav Maga learner; jogger, hiker, climber, home cook & foodie. Yu enjoys athletic activities and healthy cuisine.

He acquires much motivation from problem solving, he likes to be challenged, and win. So, he came to Columbia University.

He sees this world as his oyster, exploring it physically and mentally. He loves travelling, while listening to stories, myths, and legends, like an Ancient Greek bard does. His voice is the epic of his odyssey, and he speaks for the voiceless.

Humanity is the theme of Yu’s lifelong pursuit of studies. He will approach and interpret this complexed society through his independent perspective. As an oral historian, he is going to empower the powerless and uplift the downtrodden.

Yu also is known as Killian, find him via:

YouTube/Bilibili/Weibo/WeChatOfficial/RED @ByKliian

Instagram/Facebook @Killian.tsui

Keren Piao (2020)

Keren Piao graduated from Zhejiang University (Class of 2019) with double degree of History and Japanese Language and literature. Her motivation in east Asian culture and history was originally triggered by her Korean Chinese background. Some of her research interests include ethnic Korean immigrant culture and history, East Asian Buddhism studies and ethnic minorities in China. 

Keren’s path to oral history budded during her undergraduate when she was engaged in an oral history project of a rural clan rooted in Zhejiang. The fieldwork comprises with local belief of Zhejiang Province and immigrant history of local clan. Through re-collecting local pedigree and chorography, she found how the moral value in text recordings was reflected in physical relics like shrines and inscriptions. During interviewing left-behind elderly folks, she was able to take a glimpse of the trace of immigrant history of local clan. 

Illuminated by how personal narratives echo the weight of individual as witness of history, Keren was thrilled to join 2020 cohort of OHMA. She is looking forward to diving deeper into historical conversation with ethnic Korean immigrants after the Korean War. 

Auriana Woods (2022)

Auriana Woods (she/her/hers) is a historian in-the-making, an amateur genealogist, a daughter of the Great Migration, and an avid investigator at heart. She first moved to New York in 2019 after graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in Africana Studies, but is originally from Seattle, WA by way of Detroit, MI and Mayfield, KY.

Her belief that silence and truth are one and the same is likely thanks to her father, who taught her the invaluable skills of inference, persistence, and improvisation at an early age. She is driven by a fundamental urge to get to the bottom of things, which comes down to an intense (and often stubborn) passion for authenticity, intimacy, and real meaning.

Auriana works and creates with the knowledge that, in the words of Miss Ida B. Wells, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them,” and with a firm conviction that unearthing, gathering, and preserving Black personal narratives is one of the most powerful tools to do justice by our collective past, present, and future lineage.

Her thesis will build off of a personal genealogy project that is five years in the making: a search for a family history lost in the aftermath of leaving Kentucky during the Great Migration in 1953 and her grandmother’s unexpected death in 1968. Her primary ~personal~ goal in doing so is (and always has been) to know herself, her history, and those with whom she belongs. 

Her project also lives at the intersection of her two most central academic (and still personal) research interests:

1. The consequences of having a popular national history that fails to position slavery and its ongoing legacy as the bedrock from which her country was (and is) built (“Past is present is passed on.” –Tiya Miles, All That She Carried);

2. The oscillating effects of the Great Migration on Black American identity formation, with a particular emphasis on the relationship to nationhood, sense of place, and belonging.

Auriana is very excited to be a part of a program that allows her to combine her love for Black American history, investigative research, knowledge production, storytelling, and archival genealogy in one place, and importantly, to be doing work that engages in the recovery of humanity across the diaspora –– what she considers to be central to her duty as a historian.

Roberto Carrillo (2020)

My name is Roberto Carrillo but everyone calls me Robert. I live in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park where people from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala and China have called it home. My exposure to the different cultures in Sunset Park sparked my interest in photography, capturing the everyday lives and scenery of the world around me has taken me to Japan a number of times during my time as an Undergraduate in Brooklyn College. Oral history has played a vital part through my life as I heard my parent's experience of immigrating to the United States in search of a better future as well as similar anecdotes from neighbors, friends, and other members of my family.

At the time I didn't interpret their experiences as oral history because I was unaware of oral history as a concept but that changed when I took a Vietnam War class in Brooklyn College. Over the span of five years, I was able to strengthen my understanding of oral history by conducting projects of my own such as manuscripting an autobiography of a Vietnam War veteran, founding the Brooklyn College Listen project along with some professors, and being a research assistant for the Brooklyn College Haitian Studies Institute by using elements of oral history such as audio and visual recording, and transcribing. 

It is no secret the New York is made out of two distinct cities, the research I hope to partake involves recording the experiences of residents living in communities of color such as Sunset Park and distinguish any economic, social, and political factor that may put them at a disadvantage from someone living in a neighborhood such as Park Slope or Bay Ridge and the obstacles the residents overcome on a daily basis. This is the idea I have for my project but I still have to work on a couple of factors such as census data from the past decade. I feel excited as well as grateful for being able to partake in the Oral History Program. I look forward to hearing the ideas from my fellow cohorts and professors.

Rattana Bounsouaysana (2019)

Rattana’s focus revolves around her Lao-American identity and culture and explores ways to give agency to the Lao diaspora and educating the public at large. She believes there should be more representation of the community so others can understand such things as the immigrant and refugee experience to Lao food culture and music. Her interest also lies in cultural studies and the arts. In her free time, she enjoys exploring the city, going to art exhibitions, live music events, finding new foods, and is always looking for her next travel destination.

Rattana has her Master of Arts in Oral History at Columbia University, her certification from the TESOL Certificate Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, and her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Lindsay Szper (2022)

Lindsay Szper is a linguist and a language teacher. She’s fluent in English, Spanish and French, conversational in American Sign Language, and a beginner in several other languages. She has a BA in Spanish, French and Cross-Cultural Studies, a national certification in English/Spanish healthcare interpreting, and a Certificate in Teaching English. Her professional experience is in language teaching, conflict mediation, translation/interpreting, legal case investigation, and interview-based research and writing,

In July, 2021 Lindsay co-founded Culture Without Borders Language Collective, a community school that teaches world languages through friendship. She's currently developing a conversation-focused language-learning program based on materials co-produced for her OHMA thesis. Learn what we're up to at CWB (and join our language-learning community!) at CWBcollective.com

Ru-Jün Zhou (2020)

 Ru-Jün has over two decades of experience in non-profit and philanthropic sectors, playing roles where she could build platforms for untold stories in underserved communities. She has spearheaded projects in Asia and the US that empowered participants to explore and express their stories through photography, creative writing, movement, and film. In parallel, she has become a student of somatic contemplative traditions. She has learned through years of meditation and dyad practice that, in our modern world, we have largely forgotten how to be with one another—how to be present and listen simply, with an open and awakening heart. This recognition points to a primal truth that is being equally uncovered by modern cognitive science and psychology: to flourish as a human, one must feel heard and seen.

Through work and later the OHMA program, Ru-Jün sees how an interview setting could be a powerful modality for meeting this deep human need to be seen and heard. In a space that is open, attentive, and shorn of judgments, a natural, compassionate, and accurate response arises. In this "attended third space," where two embodied humans meet in openness, communication becomes clear and effortless. A story can be told, and the "life force" of that story can truly sing. 

She is known for her ability to think creatively, fostering innovative perspectives, and thrives in the synoptical integration process, integrating diverse ideas, theories, and practices to create a holistic approach. She often navigates this journey independently while now seeking to join forces with the like-minded for collaboration. For her, practicing oral history transcends the acts of recording and transcribing; it is a practice of generosity and humility, engaging in an embodied way of listening that is beyond orality. She views this practice as a way to metabolize experiences and interweave the strands of individual and collective wisdom that form the rich tapestry of our shared human experience.