Carlin Liu Zia is a polyhyphenate oral historian and maker whose questions include how we know what we know and how we came to be where we are. One of her favorite tools and one of her driving curiosities is silence.

Carlin is a graduate of OHMA, where her thesis Uncertain Journeys won the 2019 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History award. Uncertain Journeys, an epic poem in an invented form, records the life story of Carlin’s Chinese-born grandfather while simultaneously charting her own project of self-historicization. The first pages can be found on Oral History Works, along with an audio piece and short film created from the same fieldwork.

More recently, Carlin has worked on a range of projects across these similar themes of consciousness, movement, intergenerationality (she 100% doubts this is a word; she 99% agrees it shouldn’t be), and encounter. In summer 2020 she was an inaugural grantee of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative, collaborating with scholars and grassroots organizations in Greece to incorporate oral history, project-based learning, and digital exhibition methodologies into local migration and material history culture. Carlin is also an interviewer and transcriptionist for the Rikers Public Memory Project. She has lectured and taught workshops on transcription as a creative act, and recently co-authored the transcription style guide for an oral history memoir book project. She has freelanced across the field, from videography and post-production to qualitative research consultation. 

For the past two years leading up to her current appointment, Carlin has been working with OHMA as a Teaching Apprentice, and has co-curated the past three year-end fieldwork exhibits, including the first-ever fully virtual exhibit in Spring 2020. 

Carlin holds a BA with Distinction in English from Yale College. You can contact her at carlin.zia@columbia.edu.