Laura Barnett (2013)

In 2013, I arrived at Columbia with a career in theater, performance art, film, and education. Having received my undergraduate degree in 1988 (AB Brown University; English – Creative Writing), being back in the classroom was a thrill. The professors, my cohort, classes within and outside of OHMA: extraordinary! Since receiving my MA, I have incorporated oral history into my teaching and artistic practices.  

Projects include: editing the commemorative book Saint Ann’s School; An Unofficial History – 1965-2015; oral history interview training for choreographer Meredith Monk’s House Foundation; oral history interview training for The Actor’s Fund/Performing Arts Legacy Project; leading a workshop on oral history and the virtual theater classroom for NY Academy of Teachers; and the site-specific performance piece We Can Find The Words, commissioned by the Brooklyn Public Library in March 2021 to recognize the one-year anniversary of NYC’s lockdown. As an Advisory Board Member of Equality Now’s Adolescent Girls’ Legal Defense Fund, I have directed several documentary theater pieces that advance the organization’s mission. 

My earlier work in experimental theater includes directing/producing at 59E59 Street, Judson Church, and chashama Experimental Theatre, where I curated Windows on 42nd Street, a six-month series of installations and performances for storefront windows in a transitioning Times Square. Performance pieces Inside/Out, Secret Confession Box, and Spinning were presented in NYC and Berlin. In the 90s, I toured with Love Theatre, performing at venues including London’s ICA, Budapest’s Katona József Színház and festivals in Belgium, Holland, and the former Yugoslavia. I also worked extensively with independent filmmaker, Amir Naderi, casting films presented in competition in festivals including Cannes and Venice. Earlier work in media includes casting/producing commercial photography. In a fifteen year career, clients included Swissair, Adidas, Ray Ban, Canon, Uniqlo, Volvo, Esquire, and IBM. 

A throughline in my life has been teaching teenagers. At Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, I have directed twenty-five productions and teach Acting and Performance Art. Additional teaching: Columbia University’s Summer Program for High School Students; PS 234 & PS 89, and guest workshops at Queens College and Parson’s School of Design. I currently live in Brooklyn, my hometown, with my husband and college-age son. 

Carrie Brave Heart (2013)

Carrie Brave Heart joins the OHMA program from South Dakota. She
received her BS in History/Art History from Northern Arizona University
in 2010. She has a great love of Native American History and is excited in the possibilities resulting from the use of Oral History to add to the telling or use in the revision of traditional western historical narrative. In 2010, she began a project pertaining to artwork contained in the David Humphreys Miller Collection. This ongoing project’s purpose has been to locate living descendants of a group of Northern Plains Native American women, who Miller drew individual untitled portraits of, in the 1930’s. Her ultimate goal is to create biographies for each of these women to accompany their portraits, through the use of oral history interviews. Her current thesis work in the OHMA program is the Indian Village at the New York State Fair.

Kate Brenner (2014)

Kate Brenner attended the University of Wisconsin, where she received a BA in Chinese and a certificate in Gender and Women's Studies. There she also developed an interest in folklore, and had her first exposure to oral history, editing interview transcriptions at the Wisconsin Veteran's Museum. During two years of AmeriCorps in Minneapolis, she ran after school classes and became interested in trying to find ways to get students to tell their own stories. When she moved to New York, she began an internship with City Lore, an organization dedicated to promoting New York's living cultural heritage. Kate is especially interested in the intersection of folklore and oral history.

Ellen Brooks (2012)

Ellen Brooks (she/her/her) is an oral history producer and consultant who currently works with WiLS (Wisconsin Library Systems) on the IMLS grant-funded Accelerating Promising Practices project, mentoring and supporting a cohort of practitioners as they take on oral history initiatives, community digitization events, and other projects to document and share their unique local stories.

Prior to her current role, Ellen worked as the Oral Historian for the State Archives of North Carolina (January 2019 - August 2020) and as the Oral Historian for the Wisconsin Veterans Museum (2013-2018).

Ellen found her way to oral history through a passion for storytelling and public history. She graduated from the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University in 2013. Prior to OHMA, she received BAs in History and Communications from Fordham University and interned at multiple cultural institutions, including the Chicago History Museum, the Chicago Cultural Alliance, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Ellen is a founding member of the OHA Emerging Professionals Committee and holds a seat on the Columbia Oral History Alumni Association Board. She enjoys welcoming new voices into the oral history space - both practitioners and narrators. Ellen’s principle interests include archival practices, podcasting, digital humanities and the intersection of all these with oral history. 

K.O. Campbell (2011)

K.O. Campbell grew up on Lookout Mountain, TN. She graduated from Pomona College in 2008 with a degree in English Literature. Among other things, she is interested in an intersection in Harlem. 

William Chapman (2013)

William Chapman is a California native and recent graduate of California State University, Fresno, with a B.A. in History. His previous oral history experience has centered around interviewing World War II veterans, and the development of the Central California War Veterans Oral History Project, based at CSU Fresno. Through the course of the OHMA program at Columbia University, William hopes to apply his historical training and love for the interview process to further his goal of one day working for The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

China Ching (2008)

Bessie Dvora China Leipakumakaniokalani Ching (China Ching) was named according to Hawaiian and Jewish traditions and is honored to carry names from the matrilineal lines of both her parents. She has provided capacity-building assistance to Indigenous communities around the world with a particular focus on using media technologies and storytelling to promote Indigenous rights, support social and community change and to complement cultural documentation. China is currently an Associate Program Officer for the Christensen Fund, a private foundation based in San Francisco. She works on supporting and increasing Indigenous participation and representation in global processes affecting Indigenous rights and biocultural diversity.

China is a proud (and fierce) aunty and godmother and blessed to be the daughter and granddaughter of artists.

Sang Yi (Cindy) Choung (2009)

Cindy Choung is a New York-based nonfiction narrative specialist, and Consulting Producer for Above and Below the Ground (dir. Emily Hong; 2023 Blackstar Film Festival Official Selection), a documentary about Myanmar’s first and only country-wide environmental movement. From 2016–2021, Cindy led the communications and fundraising team for Chicken & Egg Pictures, a nonprofit organization supporting women and gender nonconforming documentary filmmakers from around the world. During her tenure, the organization won numerous awards and industry recognitions including the International Documentary Association's Amicus Award, and the Nonprofit Excellence Award special recognitions in the areas of Fundraising and Communications. As an oral historian and communications professional, she has worked with numerous organizations to strengthen their institutional narrative and identity, including the Brooklyn Museum; Columbia University’s Center for Democracy, Toleration, and Religion; and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Sewon Chung Barrera (2012)

Sewon Chung Barrera is a digital marketer, content strategist, and oral historian based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sewon currently manages the digital marketing department at the Exploratorium, a San Francisco-based museum of science, art, and human perception described by the New York Times as the most important science museum to have opened since the mid-20th century. She also serves as a Multilingual Language Advocate and communications consultant for Bay Area human rights advocacy groups and community organizations. Previously, Sewon led global content marketing campaigns at Samsung, and developed content strategies for startups and Fortune 500 companies at Brafton.

Sewon received a Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University in 2013. As a graduate student at OHMA, Sewon conducted oral history fieldwork at BLDG 92 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and museum studies field work at the American Museum of Natural History. Her thesis on Central Park North, advised by Dr. Mabel O. Wilson from the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, culminated in an interactive exhibit experience launched digitally and through a pop-up installation in Brooklyn. Sewon also holds a dual B.A. in Literary & Cultural Studies and Sociology from The College of William & Mary.

More at www.sewonchung.com

Sara Cohen-Fournier (2011)

Sara Cohen-Fournier has been working for the last 3 years as an active interviewer, and group coordinator of the community-based project Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by Wars, Genocide and Human Rights Violations. She is really exited to pursue more training and explore the issue of trauma and fear. She hopes in doing so to understand deeper the essence of listening in mental health issues.

Ellen Coon

Ellen Coon comes to the program after seven years collecting narratives of feminine divinity in the Kathmandu Valley.  A former Fulbright scholar, her interests include ritual, ecology, and food.

Allison Corbett (2013)

Allison Corbett is a Spanish interpreter, oral historian, and documentarian based in New York City. In her work she seeks to be a bridge - across language, culture, and difference. Her goal is to gather and share stories through film, radio, and interactive media, that nourish the development of strong, multilingual communities engaged in the work of self-determination and societal transformation. As an interpreter, she facilitates oral communication between Spanish-speakers and non-Spanish-speaking English-speakers with the goal of creating more inclusive and equality-minded communities.

Prior to coming to OHMA, she spent eight years in working in Latinx communities in the U.S. and Latin America as an interpreter, educator, and in various non-profit roles. During her time at OHMA, she partnered with a project documenting gentrification and displacement in Crown Heights, and conducted her fieldwork in Argentina, building on previous experiences studying the politics of memory in La Plata, Buenos Aires. Her master's thesis and subsequent film short (premiering at the 2015 Oral History Association Annual Meeting) explores the way that spaces of ruin and trauma associated with Argentina's last dictatorship reflect and interact with political memory work on the outskirts of La Plata.

Following her graduation from OHMA, Allison began working as an interpreter at Mt. Sinai, St. Luke's, and Roosevelt Hospitals and has embarked on a number of projects supporting collectives, organizers, and artists in documenting community stories in upper Manhattan. She is an enthusiastic member of the collective-run bookstore Word Up in Washington Heights, and is a founding member of the Oral History Collective, a group of OHMA-trained oral historians interested in nurturing collaborative creative processes as well as sustainable self-employment within the field. She also coordinates the Oral History Exchange, a bi-monthly book/media discussion club, as a Board member of the Columbia Oral History Alumni Association. 

Contact: corbett.allison@gmail.com

Hana Crawford (2012)

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.