Born in Washington D.C. but raised in Paris among equal parts artists and international NGO folk, Storm Garner has been based in a New York City since 2006, when she moved from Poland where she'd interned at the OSCE's Human Rights Implementation Meeting to work on a theatrical production at La Mama Experimental Theatre Company as both actor and composer. Since then she has worked in dozens of New York theatre, film, and Artworld productions as an actor, writer, filmmaker, designer, musician, and curator, all the while earning her BA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from Columbia University's General Studies program part time, as poor health in her teenage years had interrupted her formal studies.
After production designing and costume designing the dramatic feature film SOUTH MOUNTAIN by Hillary Brougher, which premiered at SXSW in 2019, Storm decided it was time for a break from the film industry, and set her sights on Columbia University’s Oral History Master’s Program, which she hoped would help her someday create an easy-to-use certification system to better connect the film industry with the oral history worlds, to work towards solving issues around underrepresented stories and people at the script development stage.
Though her end goal in the oral history world remains linking it with the film industry, she spent the last several years just focusing on learning the ropes, in the OHMA program and with her first major project, The Queens Night Market Vendor Stories Oral History Project, one close to her heart as it documents the cultural impact of a public endeavor--the Queens International Night Market--she helped her now-husband John Wang get off the ground in 2015. The collection will be primarily archived at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, with pandemic-era follow-up interviews additionally archived with the Queens Public Library’s Queens Memory Project. Derivative projects include a cookbook with personal narratives from the mostly-immigrant chef vendors' oral histories, called The World Eats Here: Amazing Food and the Inspiring People Who Make It at New York’s Queens Night Market, published May 2020 by The Experiment, and a "Vendor Portrait" short video series in the works.
Storm has presented twice about the project at Oral History Association Annual Meetings, and looks forward to continuing to learn alongside future OHMA cohorts, the greater oral history world, and as always... lived experience itself.