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.