Hana Crawford joins the 2012-2013 OHMA cohort from New Mexico, her home state, where she was interviewing Native artists for the Southwest Association of Indian Arts and the 81st Santa Fe Indian Market. She completed a B.A. at Antioch College in Self, Society, and Culture, where she became acquainted with qualitative research methods. Upward mobility and post-release experiences of ex-felons are among her research interests. Hana plans to produce a radio piece as part of her thesis project.
Becky Cross (2010)
Becky Cross came to OHMA from Muskingum University. As an undergraduate Becky's focus was on the gentrification occurring in Columbus, Ohio’s historic district. Here, she explored the re-development of a historically middle-class African American neighborhood transforming into an affluent community of same-sex couples using oral history narratives, and the PBS documentary “Flag Wars.” In 2009, she was Muskingum University’s first Forensic intern and produced a publication in the “Ohio Forensics Manual” entitled: Establishing Legacy through Relationship: Exploring the Coaching Paradigm in Higher Education as “Inspired” Narrative. This work inspired by the University’s decision to “clean house,” which included the disposal of hundreds of Speech and Debate team trophies dating back to the 1960’s. While studying at Columbia, she used oral history interviews from CUNY’s “Women’s Activist Voices” collection to better understand activist identity of second wave feminists. Her thesis was entitled: Our Foremothers: Constructions of Activist Identity in the Second Wave of Feminism, which attempts to reconcile some of the tensions of contemporary feminist identity constructions by examining the lives of ordinary women from the second wave of feminism. Currently, Becky is living in Cleveland, Ohio and working as the manager of external relations for the region's largest small business support organization. The Council of Smaller Enterprise (COSE), a non-profit organization that provides advocacy on legislative and regulatory issues and educational resources to help Northeast Ohio’s small businesses grow. Recently, she interviewed 13 small business owners from northeast ohio for a video documentary displayed at COSE's 40-year anniversary annual meeting.
Benji de la Piedra (2014)
Benji de la Piedra grew up in Northern Virginia and Washington, DC. In May 2014, he graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University with a B.A. in American Studies. He has spent the past three years working for Columbia’s Freedom & Citizenship Program, helping coordinate and teach a civic engagement course modeled on the College’s Core Curriculum for first-generation, college-bound high school seniors. Benji wrote his undergraduate thesis on Ralph Ellison's unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting, for which he received departmental honors. Ellison’s writings have provided Benji a useful and evocative language for investigating the civic, educational, and artistic implications of American racial identities. For his OHMA thesis, Benji returned to Three Days, introducing the text and its author to the discourse of oral history ethics and intellectual history by way of the Federal Writers’ Project of the late 1930s. In September, Benji and Mario Alvarez (OHMA '15) will begin gathering the life histories of current Columbia graduate students from all backgrounds. With these interviews, they hope to initiate a restorative campus-wide conversation about the ideals and nuanced realities of diversity, belonging, and inclusion at the university.
Andi Dixon (2009)
Andrea Dixon came to OHMA from Emory University where she received her B.A. in Political Science. Her previous experience includes internship work in public media production and distribution at Georgia Public Broadcasting as well as with the public radio program ‘This American Life’. While at OHMA, her research culminated in a master’s thesis entitled, “Network Lives: Cognitive Sociograms as Present in the Oral Histories of Seven Former PEG Students”. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Columbia School of Journalism.
Sarah Dziedzic (2009)
Sarah Dziedzic works as an oral historian, project consultant, and workshop facilitator in New York City. She has produced oral history projects with Storm King Art Center, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center, the Estate of Félix González-Torres, and the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, among others. She has also worked as a literary memoir editor with Seven Stories Press and Autonomedia, and serves on the board of Word Up Community Bookshop, a volunteer-run bookstore and cultural space in Washington Heights. She is the current president of the Columbia Oral History Alumni Association, where she collaborates with fellow alumni of the Oral History Master of Arts program on events that support colleagueship and establish fair labor standards for oral historians and other cultural workers.
@Contact: sarahdziedzic@gmail.com
Haitao Fan (2011)
Haitao Fan has been working as a financial journalist for the Beijing Youth Daily since 2002. In 2009, she wrote an autobiography for the former CEO of Google China, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, which sold more than 1,000,000 copies. From 2011-2013, she studied at OHMA as the first student from Mainland China. After graduation, she worked as the first reporter based in Washington, D.C. for Sina, one of the largest portals in China.
Haitao then returned home and worked as the China representative for U.S News and World Report. Since October 2015, she has been building her own studio and dedicating herself to oral history interviewing and biography writing. Her new book, Life Begins at Thirty, was launched in March 2016. This book garnered much attention not only in Chinese oral history community but also in the young generation.
Joyce-Zoë Farley
Like most media professionals, I live my life in a perpetual "go to go" mentality and a to-do list that never ends. What makes me different? Passion. It drives everything I do and will do. Strange? Slightly, but I figure if there isn't a personal connection of some sort why bother. I'm a proud 2010 Hampton University graduate. At my "Home By The Sea" I studied broadcast journalism with a minor in business management. I graduated with both university and departmental honors
Aside from my passion driven life, as previously mentioned I'm a diverse media professional with experience in journalism (TV, radio and print), public relations and new media. Like many others in my field, I have lived and worked all over the country—D.C., Phoenix, Detroit and Cincinnati. The highlight of my young career is my summer spent interning in Detroit. I discovered in my three-month awakening that Detroit would become my life’s work and sole focus. I literally cannot have a conversation with someone without mentioning Detroit that is how much I love the city.
My time spent at Columbia will further support my professional and research endeavors. My thesis in the oral history program focuses on African-American history and culture. It is a multimedia project that leads to my doctoral dissertation at Michigan State University, where I will pursue an additional masters, as well as, a doctorate in African-American studies with concentrations in Public Policy and Film. Academically, my areas of research cover the span of a century starting with the Great Migration in 1917 and ending with the neo rebirth of civil rights in 2017. The pinnacle will be the riots of 1943, 1965, 1967, 1968 and 1992.
My overall goal is to be the quintessential game changer--an elected official in Michigan with plans to revitalize Detroit; a business owner with a philanthropic arm to help educate and serve the people and a college professor teaching classes on African-American history, urban development and cultural analysis.
All in all, by the time I turn 30, I can be addressed as Dr. Joyce-Zoë Farley.
Shanna Farrell (2011)
Shanna Farrell holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia University, where she focused on environmental justice issues in communities impacted by water pollution. Her work has included a community history of the Hudson River, a documentary audio piece entitled “Hydraulic Fracturing: An Oral History” that explores the complexity of the issues involved in drilling for natural gas in both Pennsylvania and New York, examining the local politics of “Superfunding” the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York, and a landscape study of a changing neighborhood in South Brooklyn. In addition to her MA from Columbia, she holds an Interdisciplinary MA from New York University and a BA in Music from Northeastern University.
Danielle Feinberg (2008)
Danielle R. Feinberg came to OHMA with an undergraduate degree in Linguistic Anthropology from Brandeis University. She first learned about oral history while helping to archive and preserve testimonies of Holocaust survivors for Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles (now the USC Shoah Foundation Institute). After relocating to New York, and changing careers (which she is very good at doing), Danielle attended culinary school and worked as a pastry chef before joining OHMA’s inaugural cohort. Through OHMA she was able to use oral history to explore and synthesize many of her lifelong interests and pursuits, including, photography, memory, identity, and food. Danielle currently works in the Department of Psychology at Barnard College.
Erica Fugger (2012)
Erica Fugger is an oral historian and peace educator based in the New York City area. She actively works with organizations, communities, and families to implement historical documentation and dialogue initiatives.
Erica previously managed Columbia University’s Center for Oral History Archives and Oral History MA program, and served as an Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. She also recently directed Washington College’s World War II public memory program, the National Home Front Project, which collaborates with communities across the United States to document and preserve civilian experiences of the war.
Erica is continuing to explore the lasting impacts of war and peace movements through doctoral work in Rutgers University-Newark’s American Studies PhD program. Her research builds upon foundations established through her MA degree in Oral History from Columbia University and her BA in History & German from Union College. Deepening her community-engaged practice, Erica currently serves as the co-director of World War 2 Peace and a graduate assistant for the Queer Newark Oral History Project.
If you are interested in learning more about Erica’s work, please reach out via the links below:
Professional Website: www.ericafugger.com
LinkedIn: Erica A. Fugger
Pronunciation: Few-grrr
Contact: peaceisnotpassive@gmail.com
Shannon Geis (2012)
Shannon Geis received her B.A. in journalism and politics from New York University. During her undergraduate studies, she became interested in radio and audio production, as well as alternative forms of documentary and storytelling. She recently completed an intensive program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, where she studied documentary radio and multimedia storytelling. She is interested in documenting the urban landscape of New York City through the voices of those that live here, as well as exploring different methods in showcasing oral histories.
Helen Gibb (2014)
Helen Gibb: Since 2011, when I attended the Summer Institute at the CCOH, it has been a dream of mine to join the OHMA program. So I'm making the trip 'across the pond' to New York from my native England. I received a BA in History from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where I lived for 4 years and it was there that I first encountered oral history. My research interests include narratives of trauma, second-generation memory and using digital technologies creatively to tell stories. While in the USA I'm also looking forward to honing my Ultimate frisbee skills with the Columbia University women's team.
Sheila Gilliam (2013)
Shelia Gilliam received her B.S. Ed. from Jackson State University and her M.Ed. from Lesley University in Curriculum and Instruction. She joins OHMA after completing a two year teaching stint in the United Arab Emirates. Prior to her international experience, she has worked as a public school educator for seventeen years. Throughout her career, she has participated with the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute and Civic Voices International Memory Bank Project in which she facilitated a student led oral history project linking the Atlanta Student Movement with historic nonfiction.
Jacob Horton (2013)
Jacob Horton worked with the Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) for two years following graduation from the OHMA program. During that time, he developed content for a museum exhibition elucidating the experiences of Nantucket’s first-generation immigrant population, established a volunteer interviewing program, and organized the NHA’s standing oral history archive which holds oral records dating back to 1934.
He developed a series of social media products focused on sharing and highlighting oral history materials including a regular blog, mixed media content, and a 6-episode podcast titled “All Ears Nantucket.”
He is currently working for a biopharmaceutical corporation in Singapore as part of a multi-discipline design team, helping develop their ethnographic practices.
Nicole JeanBaptiste (2014)
Nicole JeanBaptiste is a resident and native of the Bronx, New York with Caribbean and Southern American parentage. She earned her B.A. degree in African and African-American Studies from Lehman College of the City University of New York. Nicole credits her professional experience at Sauti Yetu Center for African Women and Families, a community based organization in NYC, for much of her training in youth leadership and development work, as she started out as an intern with the Girls Empowerment and Leadership Initiative (GELI) program while still working to complete her undergraduate degree. After working as the Program Coordinator for the GELI program for over a year, Nicole left her position to accept a United States Student Fulbright Award to study and conduct research in Jamaica, West Indies. While there, she completed a project, which sought to explore the link between Rastafarian art and craftwork and traditional African art and craftwork. Upon her return to the United States, Nicole began her training in teaching English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) to a culturally diverse group of immigrant women living in the South Bronx. Nicole brings with her to OHMA an undeniable commitment to girls’ and women’s empowerment and a steadfast love and appreciation for all things cultural. She is a doula in training and a proud mama of a 6 year old son.
Kimberly Johnson (2009)
Kimberly Johnson came to OHMA with an undergraduate degree in History and German from DePauw University. While at Columbia, her work focused on the experiences of Thomas J. Watson Fellows from 1977-2003 and how their experience was changed by increased access to technology. She is currently working at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in the department of Medical Education. In her spare time, she works on oral history projects, most recently the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library's OH project, and some promotional work for the Crossing Boarders, Bridging Generations project's public programming at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
Contact: kimberlinaj@gmail.com
Anna Kaplan (2009)
Anna Kaplan came to OHMA with a BA in Anthropology with Folklore and Creative Writing minors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a MA in Anthropology from Columbia. Since graduating from OHMA, she has worked on oral history projects of the Atlanta Fox Theatre and of women activists in Chapel Hill, NC. The past four summers she has worked on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC. She is currently pursuing her PhD in History at American University, studying race relations in the southern US and the process of future generations inheriting memories of the Civil Rights Era.
Svetlana Kitto (2009)
Svetlana Kitto works as a writer, teacher and oral historian in New York City. She has an MA in Oral History from Columbia University, and currently works as the project lead on an oral history project with Jewish Theological Seminary; and as an interviewer on the Brooklyn Historical Society's Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations Oral History Project, which examines the history and experiences of mixed-heritage people and families in Brooklyn. She has taught oral history and creative writing workshops at a homeless youth drop-in center in Chinatown, NYC, a high school in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, and at the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is the writer, most recently, of an essay in Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, published by Verso Books in December 2011.
Ellen Klemme (2009)
Ellen Klemme graduated from Carleton College with BAs in History and Pre-Medical Studies and had lived across the Midwest and Middle East before arriving at Columbia's OHMA program. She studies Palestinian history; her Masters thesis investigated the practice of listening to archival oral histories, specifically paramedics' memories of responding to the collapsing World Trade Towers on September 11th, 2001. After graduating from OHMA, Ellen was the primary editor of Cesare Civetta's book "Perspectives on Toscanini" and lectured about her research at Columbia University's 2011 Oral History Summer Institute, "Rethinking 9/11: Life Stories, Cultural Memory and the Politics of Representation." She is currently living in Minnesota, developing and coordinating a tutoring program for impoverished teenagers through AmeriCorps VISTA.
Kristen La Follette (2011)
Kristen La Follette employs playwriting to reimagine interviews on stage. Her verbatim play, Pushing Against the Water: A Bay Area Muslim Women’s Oral History Project was featured in the 2019 Greenhouse Theatre Festival in San Francisco. A Glimpse Through the Curtain: Monologues of American Catholic Sisters was read in New York City and Pennsylvania. Kristen researches and writes about oral history theatre. She taught workshops for organizations, including the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and Veteran’s Oral History Project. Kristen graduated in 2012 with an M.A. in Oral History. She worked at Columbia Center for Oral History, serves on the Columbia Oral History Alumni Association Board and is a founding member of the Oral History Association’s Emerging Professionals Committee. In 2019, she earned her M.F.A. in Playwriting from San Francisco State University. She teaches creative writing and oral history at California State University Monterey Bay.