Liz Strong (2014)

Liz Strong: I grew up in New England, lived for years in the North West, and moved to New York City in 2014. In 2015 I received my MA in Oral History from Columbia University. I conducted my Masters thesis work with the NYPD Guardians Association, a fraternal organization for black police. The oral history of the Guardians Association can be accessed via the Columbia Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, as well as a collection of the organization's newsletters.

My BA from Oberlin College in 2009 was in Narrative Arts. There, I completed an individually designed major, which examined narrative theory, folklore, and explored in-depth tools for communicating narrative in visual arts and storytelling performance.

Prior to my time with the Columbia Oral History MA program, I was a professional storyteller, and a freelance personal historian in the North West. I led workshops and trainings, and managed projects for a variety of organizations and families.

These days, I am based in Brooklyn and I continue to manage several oral history projects. My recent clients have included the Brooklyn Historical Society, the New York Preservation Archive Project, and the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Leyla Vural (2014)

I have been working as an independent oral historian, based in New York City, since I completed the OHMA program in May 2015. My work has included projects about neighborhood change and efforts to preserve sites of cultural importance in working-class communities and communities of color; a project about New York City’s potter’s field; interviews with LGBTQ New Yorkers for the Stonewall National Monument; and interviews with folklorists, musicians, craftspeople, and historians for a series of cultural audio tours of Sligo and Donegal, Ireland. For an ongoing project I developed for The Rockefeller University, I am interviewing pre-eminent scientists and editing each interview into a short film about the experience of discovery. I am an international affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montréal. In 2016, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College selected my piece on ethical listening as a “favorite essay” and I was the storyteller at a conference at the U.N. on sustainable energy for all. I have a Ph.D. in geography from Rutgers University and worked in the labor movement for 20 years before joining the OHMA program. Samples of my work are available at www.lvcomm.com.

Cameron Vanderscoff (2013)

Cameron Vanderscoff is an oral historian and educator whose practice is grounded in the creative, executive, and interpersonal skills necessary to take story initiatives from idea to execution. He has worked with Columbia University, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the University of California, the Apollo Theatre, and many other institutions, advancing innovative qualitative research projects, personal and family memoirs, community history efforts, and other narrative-based ventures. With an extensive track record of public and private partnerships and a versatile project portfolio, Cameron has worked and consulted widely in the U.S. and in countries across three continents, including his ongoing collaboration on historical dialogue in Okinawa, Japan with the Okinawa Memories Initiative. Back home in New York, he is the co-director of the Summer Institute of the Columbia Centre for Oral History, and recently served as the co-chair of the 2017 Oral History & The City conference. He is a consultant and interviewer for the Narrative Trust, a leading private oral history firm.

In addition to his field experience, Cameron holds an MA in oral history from Columbia University and two BAs from UC Santa Cruz. He also works as a musician and is developing a new documentary about the intersection of jazz and veterans’ issues in Harlem.

Sara Wolcott Weinberg

Sara Wolcott Weinberg holds a Master's Degree from NYU in Trauma and Violence as well as a Master's Degree from Columbia in Oral History.  At Columbia, she was finally able to merge her interests and complete a project she began in Rwanda in 2008, where she interviewed survivors of the 1994 genocide.  She is currently a freelance editor at Chime for Change, an administrative coordinator at the Child Mind Institute, and has two oral history projects in the works.  

Erica Zora Wrightson (2014)

Born in Pasadena, California, Erica Zora Wrightson has worked as a journalist, writer/editor, and arts administrator for newspapers and magazines, museums, and nonprofits around Los Angeles. Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have been published in the L.A. Weekly, L.A. Times, Pasadena Magazine, and Slake: Los Angeles. While pursuing her B.A. in literature and poetry at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, she spent a year in South Africa, studying poetry in Durban and documenting the stories of a group of women in Cape Town living with HIV/AIDS. Her research interests include regional cuisines, ethnomusicology, and narrative medicine.