Nicki Pombier Berger (2010)

Nicki Pombier Berger is an oral historian, educator, and artist.

 As an oral historian, Nicki works primarily on arts-based community engagement projects. Currently, she is collaborating with playwright Suli Holum on an oral history-based play about the Bakken shale. From 2014-2015, she worked on A Fierce Kind of Love, The Institute on Disabilities at Temple University’s multifaceted arts-based project on the intellectual disability rights movement in Pennsylvania.

As a community partner and oral historian on the project, Nicki trained volunteers to interview narrators with intellectual disabilities, and co-curated content for a multimedia exhibit online and in the rotunda of the Pennsylvania State Capitol and Philadelphia’s City Hall (Here. Stories from Selinsgrove Center and KenCrest Services).

From 2013-2104, she designed and produced an oral history-based professional development film, the TILL Living Legacy Project, to train staff at a service agency to see the complexity and humanity of the individuals with intellectual disabilities with whom they work. The TILL Living Legacy Project won the 2015 Innovation Award from the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers. In 2013, she produced an online multimedia collection of stories from self-advocates with Down syndrome, “Nothing About Us Without Us.”

From 2010-2013, she led several community engagement efforts at the national nonprofit organization, StoryCorps. From 2015-2017, she was a Research Fellow on the Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project.

Nicki is the Founding Editor of Underwater New York, a digital journal of stories, art and music inspired by the waterways of NYC, which has published more than 150 works, curated dozens of events in all five boroughs, and been profiled in The New York Times, among other outlets. She and Underwater New York are 2017 recipients of a Brooklyn Arts Fund grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council.

She is a fiction and poetry editor for the book, Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City’s Forgotten Waterfront, which was published by Damiani in September, 2016.  She is also an editor of In Context Journal, with fellow OHMA alums Sarah Dzidzic, Cindy Choung, and Sewon Berrera, an independent platform for oral historical work and thoughtful explorations of what it means to listen, to speak, and to be heard.   

Nicki has taught at the New School for Drama (New School University, New York, NY) since fall 2015, and teaches oral history workshops regularly, for a wide range of audiences and purposes, including teaching a workshop at Oral History Summer School on mixed-ability interviewing in June 2015. Along with her collaborator and fellow OHMA alum Liza Zapol, she has co-developed and co-led Push Play, a workshop drawing on the tools and language of performance ethnography and theatre studies to enliven the practice of oral history as art.

Nicki has a Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University (2013), a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (2009), and a Bachelor of Science in the Foreign Service from Georgetown University (2001). More at www.nickipombierberger.com

Lisa Polay (2010)

Oral history is catalyzed by the ability of a narrator to situate and contextualize his/herself through time.  Memory is the dynamic and fragile infrastructure of that collection process.

Lisa Polay’s graduate research began as a historiographical website examining the mechanical and cultural production of remembering and forgetting.  From scientific theory through fiction, the site drew together memory research and theories across varying disciplines, highlighting the intersection of biology, neurology, culture and technology. 

Trying to remember last Thursday and wondering how babies know how to use cellphones is all still a conundrum to her, as she continues to collect bits and pieces at halflifeofmemory.com. She supplemented her studies with courses in Medical Humanities and Organizational Sociology. Lisa is a member of the inaugural design team leading the IoT/Lincoln Center Film Festival collaboration through the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab.

Lisa also teaches technology to older adults and listens to high school students through StoryCorps U.  She recently completed an oral history for New England’s oldest art association and the collection is to be deposited in the New Hampshire State Archives. Those experiences informed a paper she presented at the 2015 OHMAR conference at Rutgers concerning cultural bias towards older adults with acute or chronic illness.

For over fifteen years, Lisa administered and cultivated cultural projects: first through several years in advertising and then throughout a decade at The Museum of Modern Art. None of this had anything to do with going to Columbia University to study oral history, yet all of it has informed her scholarship. Her work has brought her across the globe - to all the continents and many of their countries - yet four places escaped any route: Russia, Ireland, Hawaii and North Dakota. Mystery still beckons. 

April Reynosa (2009)

April Reynosa studied Sociocultural Anthropology and Human Development at Brigham Young University. As a recipient of BYU’s ORCA Research Grant and as the Child Development Coordinator for the International Rescue Committee Boston’s literacy program, April conducted ethnographic research on Somali Bantu Refugee Women’s perception of urban space. As an OHMA student and Curriculum Developer for the Mexican Education Foundation of New York, April conducted life history interviews with Mexican-American youth which culminated into a thesis entitled, "In Between Narratives: Examples of Hybrdity in the Oral Histories of Three Mexican American Youth Living in New York City." April's research explored hybridity and a possible third option of identity formation in which the individual does not feel they must choose between cultures. April recently worked as an interviewer for the Brooklyn Historical Society's oral history project, Crossing Borders Bridging Generations. She is also a Concordia University Oral History Affiliate. April is currently living in Argentina with her husband and their daughter.

Samuel Robson (2012)

Samuel Robson is the oral historian for the David J. Sencer CDC Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. He interviews staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about their experiences responding to the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic. Once processed, these interviews will be made available online.

A 2014 OHMA graduate, Sam wrote his thesis based on life histories of people living with dementia and their family members. Previously, Sam collected narratives of Afro-Nicaraguan veterans of the 1980s Contra War.

Molly Rosner (2008)

Molly Rosner came to OHMA from Wesleyan University where she majored in American Studies and studied housing in New York City. After graduating from OHMA she interned with the Apollo Theater Oral History Project, and worked as a researcher for BLDG92, the historical institute at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She then worked as an educator at the Brooklyn Museum, using oral history and storytelling to explore the art and history of the city. She has also worked at The American Legacy Foundation, an anti-tobacco organization, to institute their archive. Molly maintains a blog "Brooklyn In Love and At War" which features and analyzes letters written during WWII. Some of the letters are now on display at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she plans to host a public program in the coming year. She is currently a doctoral student in American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She works with Lyra Monteiro on The Museum On Site, creating site-specific interactive public historical exhibits. She studies cities and suburbs using media and children's literature.

Maye Saephanh (2012)

Maye Saephanh comes to OHMA with a background in humanitarian assistance.  She received her B.A in Political Science with a Minor in Global Peace & Security Studies from the University of CA at Santa Barbara.  She has spent most of her career supporting international NGOs and most recently with the U.S. government in Afghanistan where she worked alongside the U.S. and NATO military forces to manage stabilization programs in rural communities.  

Phil Sandick

Phil Sandick came to OHMA from Botswana, where he was writing the history of a private secondary school.  He now lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter.  He is in a dual degree program at Northwestern Law in which he'll earn a JD and an LLM in International Human Rights.  While in law school, he co-founded www.africanlookbook.com, which presents oral histories of African creatives and retails cutting-edge African design.  More at www.philsandick.com 

Contact: phil.sandick@gmail.com

Marie Scatena (2008)

Marie Scatena experienced OHMA as a student in the first graduating class, and in spring 2010, and in 2011-2012 she taught OHMA’s Oral History Workshop and Fieldwork, Production, Documentation and Archiving Course.   Marie conducted her thesis research at the MoMA, and drew on her background in museum education to help OHMA students realize collaborative projects for public presentation and creative theses. In recent years Marie contributed extended oral history projects such as Columbia Teacher’s College ART CART Project with fellows interviewing aging visual artists for an exhibition and website and The National Public Housing Museum’s collection efforts with youth.  Today Marie is an independent researcher, developer and consultant based in Chicago. She works with institutions, organizations and communities to collect and interpret stories.

Taylor Schwarzkopf (2011)

Taylor Schwarzkopf is originally from Boise, Idaho. He is interested in the stories and lives of New York’s dwindling working and middle classes.  His work is currently focused on the histories of the men and women of the Transport Workers Union Local 100. Taylor is interested in adding to the collective body of 20th Century New York City and working class history through the lens of this particularly “New York” group.  He has been a New Yorker since 2003.

Charis Emily Shafer (2010)

Charis Emily Shafer holds a B.A. in art history from New York University and a M.A. in film and literature from the University of Essex. She worked at the Columbia Center for Oral History from 2008-2012 before which she spent several years in Cambodia working on the documentary Resident Aliens that screened in New York at the Asian American International Film Festival. While in Southeast Asia, she also taught gender studies to Cambodian undergraduates and was associate editor of AsiaLife, writing about development and the arts.  

She has served as associate producer on the television series Trabank Trek, a show about the journey of plastic cars from Germany to Cambodia, that aired on the Travel Channel International. Charis has filmed and assisted on works featuring Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai, famed singer Gladys Knight, and the video artist Joan Jonas. She is currently completing her M.A. in Oral History at Columbia University by creating a piece on the Occupy movement. She lives in Brooklyn.

Bill Smith (2014)

Bill Smith is a veteran of 30 years in the New York publishing culture, and is the founder/CEO of the Bill Smith Group, Inc. (BSG), a developer of children’s print and digital content. At BSG, Smith led a global team of 100+ writers, editors, designers, illustrators and photo professionals servicing Nat Geo, Scholastic, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, the Yale Center for British Art and MoMA P.S.1.   BSG designed the Muppets first music release, created the world’s #1 children’s reference, and crafted the Discovery Channel's launch to U.S. Schools.

Sara Sinclair (2012)

Sara Sinclair is an oral historian of Cree-Ojibwa, German-Jewish and British descent. A graduate of Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts program, Sara was the project manager and lead interviewer for Columbia Centre for Oral History Research’s Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project. With Peter Bearman and Mary Marshall Clark, Sinclair edited a book from these narratives, which will be published by Columbia University Press in spring 2019.Prior to attending OHMA, Sara lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she conducted an oral history project for the International Labour Organization’s Regional Office for Africa. Sara’s work as an oral history consultant includes work for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the Exit Art Closure Study, a research project on the closure of New York gallery/artist’s space Exit Art (1982-2012). For Sara’s thesis at Columbia she conducted a series of interviews exploring the narratives of university-educated, reservation-raised Native North Americans on returning to their Nations after school. Sara expanded this project, How We Go Home, through Voice of Witness’ Story Lab and is currently editing a forthcoming book with the organization.

McKenna Stayner (2013)

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.