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.

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. 

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.

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. Sage has assisted with artist interviews and research for galleries, museums, and arts organizations like Hauser and Wirth and the Archives of American Art. She 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.

Ananya Garg (2023)

Ananya Garg (she/her) is a visual artist, writer, and oral historian. She graduated from OHMA in 2025. During her time as a student, Ananya combined her coursework within OHMA and the Visual Arts department to complete her thesis “Artmaking As Intervention in Oral History Methodology: Painting Portraits of Queer/Trans South Asian Chosen Family.”

Ananya has completed and/or worked on several oral history projects including working on the NYC Department of Records and Information Services’ Neighborhood Stories project, Lehman College’s LGBTQIA+ Oral History project, contributing to the University of Washington’s Department of Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies 50th anniversary oral history archive, an oral history project of queer and trans students of color, and as part of the Museum Education Fellowship Program at the Brooklyn Museum, a project interviewing alumni of the museum’s teen programs. She has been deeply moved by the experience and reciprocity of giving and receiving stories within her community. Before OHMA, Ananya was trained in oral history methodology under the guidance of Dr. Priti Ramamurthy during her undergraduate education in the Department of Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She also completed training with Suzanne Snider at Oral History Summer School.

You can find Ananya’s writing published or forthcoming in YES! Magazine, The Asian American Feminist Collective, Sinister Wisdom, The Asian American Writers Workshop, and elsewhere. A queer South Asian woman, Ananya lives in Brooklyn, NY with her partner and dog. When she’s not looking to hear or tell a good story, Ananya can be found painting, printmaking cards for her chosen family, and drinking hot chocolate or lemonade, depending on the season.

Bernadette Bisbing (2023)

Bernadette Bisbing is from the Philadelphia area. She grew up as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults). American Sign Language (ASL) was her first language growing up. She has had a life-long interest in learning and comparing visual and audial communication methods. She prefers to use the term “shared history” over “oral history” to better incorporate the Deaf population into the overall mission of including everyone’s contributions to our shared human experience and record.

Bernadette graduated from Temple University with her B.A majoring in History and Political Science focusing on “Third-World History” and “International Politics” as her main areas of study. She minored in Art and Latin American Studies. Later she graduated from Temple University with her M.A. in History with Soviet History as her specialized area of study. After graduating from Temple, she worked in various non-profit jobs and customer service jobs until she decided to pursue ASL-English interpreting. After working with Deaf and Deaf-Blind students for a few years she has decided to return to her first academic love - History. Bernadette enrolled in the Oral History Masters of Arts program in the Fall of 2023 to study the death of her uncle Roy Gallegos and the impact his death had on the family and the community in Santa Fe, NM. While a student in the program she worked as an intern for the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Oral History Project. She wrote her thesis, titled "Remembering Roy After Gentrification" and exhibited some of her interviews in "Zozobra Brings His Glooms East."

Outside of work and studying, Bernadette enjoys running. She has completed 28 marathons and hopes to join the 50-state marathon and half marathon clubs. She is at the halfway mark with 25 states crossed off the list. As a side project, Bernadette is also conducting oral histories of people also in pursuit of completing a race in all 50 states. Besides running she enjoys yoga, lifting weights, and hiking. She is an avid nature enthusiast and is also an animal enthusiast. Bernadette spends countless hours photographing, painting, and drawing the plants and animals she encounters in nature.

Shuai Dang (2023)

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 (2023)

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 (2023)

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 (2023)

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 (2023)

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.

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.

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

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.