McKenna Stayner is a writer, interviewer, editor, and grant writer. Currently, she is an interviewer for the Brooklyn Historical Society's oral history project with the Brooklyn School of Inquiry. Before moving to New York, she managed outreach and publicity for Voice of Witness, a social justice oral history book series published by McSweeney's. McKenna went to St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico for her undergraduate degree in philosophy and literature, and her blood runs Santa Fe-turquoise. She's interested in food justice, refugee rights, Borges, and the rejuvenation of journalism through oral history. Her thesis explores sensory memory in refugee narratives, focusing on scent and non-textual visuality.
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.
Elisabeth Sydor (2012)
Elisabeth Sydor is a writer and editor at a center of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. She’s particularly interested in stories of people living on the margin, and using literary, documentary, and theatrical formats to share these stories.
Lauren Taylor (2008)
Lauren Taylor, oral historian and psychiatric social worker, is an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and an OHMA alum. Lauren has been on staff since 1994 at the Service Program for Older People, a mental health clinic for older adults, and has a private practice. As an oral historian, she has conducted dozens of life history interviews, both in the United States and abroad, and is studying the subjective experience of aging through the medium of narrative in a cross-cultural context. Lauren has lectured and published on the therapeutic use of narrative.
Senait Tesfai (2011)
Senait Tesfai graduated with a degree in Sociology from
Harvard
College in 2007 and has since been living and working in NYC. Her
interests include minority identities, social mobility, and comedy
(alternative and mainstream). She is currently working on her thesis
which is a long audio piece and short written piece about KenSAP, a
program that brings students from rural Kenya to elite American
universities.
Lance Thurner (2008)
Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in Latin American History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.
Lance was recently named a National HWW Predoctoral Fellow for the Humanities without Walls consortium and is a regular contributor to the New Books Network podcast series on Science, Technology and Society.
Lance came to OHMA in 2008 after spending two years participating in the rebuilding process in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Building off that experience, his Masters Thesis addressed the possibilities for community-building and intersubjective exchange in the wake of climate change induced disaster.
Allison Tracy-Taylor (2008)
Allison Tracy-Taylor began her work in oral history in 2002 at the University of Nevada Oral History Program (UNOHP), eventually interviewing for a multi-year project on the history of women’s athletics at the University of Nevada. Returning to the UNOHP as its coordinator in 2009, Allison served as one of the editors for the resulting book We Were All Athletes: Title IX and Women’s Athletics at the University of Nevada.
In 2008 Allison joined the first cohort of students at Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts Program. Her research culminated in her masters thesis entitled "I began marching: Reclaiming Narrative with the Voices of Women Organizing Project".
In 2012 Allison became the oral historian for the Stanford Historical Society, working to document Stanford University’s history through the stories of prominent faculty members and administrators. In addition to interviewing, she managed a corps of volunteers and served as the program’s senior oral history mentor.
In 2015, Allison joined the Kentucky Historical Society (KHS) as the oral history administrator. In this position she supported the efforts of the Kentucky Oral History Commission (KOHC), the only commission of its kind in the United States. She provided outreach, education, and technical support to oral history projects throughout Kentucky, managed the KOHC’s grant program, and collaborated to manage KHS's extensive oral history collections.
In 2017, Allison left the KOHC to work as an independent oral historian based in Sacramento, California. She is currently working with the California State Library to develop a website that will feature oral histories about the state’s history and heritage, particularly highlighting the diversity of California.
Allison currently serves as the 2018-2019 Vice President for the Oral History Association (OHA). In October, 2019 during the OHA’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City, she will become the President of the Association, serving in this role for a year. She previously served on the OHA’s Council from 2015-2018, the Education Committee, and has served on the Program Committee for the multiple annual meetings. Allison is also a member of the Southwest Oral History Association (SOHA) and has served on SOHA’s scholarship committee. In addition to an M.A. in Oral History from Columbia University, Allison holds a B.A. in English Literature and Sociology from the University of Nevada.
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.
Ryan White (2008)
A native of suburban New Jersey, in 2000, Ryan White earned a BA from St Lawrence University in Multidisciplinary Studies focusing on the effects of Globalization in Latin America and Social Movements. After graduating, he became deeply involved in what is referred to as the Anti-Globalization Movement from Vermont where he was living. This is where his interest in radio and independent media began. The interest in radio is what eventually lean him to Columbia's Oral History MA. Ryan took his movement experience and applied it to his thesis which was based on interviews conducted with six individuals involved in that movement. After graduating from Columbia, Ryan returned to his home in Portland, OR where he is in the process of developing a small oral history business.
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.
Liza Zapol (2010)
Liza Zapol is an educator, oral historian, and screenwriter. Liza is the Director of the Pedagogy of Listening Lab at Columbia University. She teaches oral history at Columbia University with Nicki Pombier, and taught at Yale’s Public Humanities Program and The New School. Liza was a teaching artist for several years in the New York City Public School System.
Zapol has been honored to interview over 100 artists and cultural workers. Zapol was Secretarial Scholar at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art where she focused on creating oral history projects of underrepresented artists, specifically Latinx artists, Black women artists, and Native American women artists. She has created oral history projects for the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and many other organizations.
Liza is in development with two feature films she wrote with Annette Leddy about groundbreaking women artists.
Liza earned a certificate in Physical Theatre from the London International School of Performing Arts, and a certificate from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she was also a dramatic librarian. B.A. with Honors from Northwestern University. M.A. in Oral History at Columbia University.