Shuai Dang (2025)

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 (2025)

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 (2025)

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 (2025)

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 (2025)

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.