Crystal Baik: My fields of expertise are Korean/American cultural history, U.S. militarization, visual culture, memory studies, and decolonization. I received my B.A. in History and Gender Studies from Williams College, a Masters in Oral History from Columbia University, and my Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity from the University of Southern California (USC), where I was an active member of the Center for Transpacific Studies and the Indigeneity and Decolonial Research Cluster. My research and teaching focus on the enmeshment of Japanese and U.S. imperialisms in the making of a contemporary Korean diaspora. Specifically I am interested in how transnational subjects, through visual platforms such as filmmaking, performance, and social media, imagine a decolonized Korea and Pacific. Currently, I am working on a book manuscript that tackles how Korean transnational visual artists, undocumented students, social activists, and other actors (1989 to present) mobilize visual works to conceptualize a decolonial aesthetic sensibility, praxis, and epistemology. Such works, I argue, gesture to the precarious conditions propelling the twentieth century formation of a Korean diaspora across Asia, the Pacific and Oceania, and the entanglement of Korean subjects in the consolidation of settler colonial regimes, including the U.S. state.
Sarah Loose (2010)
Sarah K. Loose is a popular educator, oral historian, and community organizer based in Portland, Oregon. Currently, she directs the Rural Organizing Project's Roots & Wings Oral History Project. The project informs ROP’s ongoing work by collectively documenting, analyzing and sharing ROP's history of grassroots, progressive organizing in Oregon’s rural, small town and frontier communities. Sarah is the founder and co-coordinator of Groundswell, a national network of practitioners experimenting with oral history as a method to build movements and support work for social justice. She also runs History From Below, a "traveling history workshop" that engages rural and small town Oregonians in an exploration of their own communities' social movement history. Sarah first fell in love with the power and practice of oral history when facilitating a two-year, community-based oral history project with popular educators in Santa Marta, El Salvador (2001-2003). In the years since, she has organized for economic, racial and environmental justice alongside rural progressives, immigrants, people of faith, and low-income workers in Washington and Oregon. Sarah has a B.A. in History from Yale University (2001).
Lamar Lovelace (2011)
Lamar Lovelace is currently the Director, Cultural Affairs and Student Engagement at Broward College. Prior to that he was Assistant Director in the Office of Community Outreach for the School of the Arts at Columbia University in the City of New York. He received an undergraduate degree in Speech and Hearing Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002, a graduate degree in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004, and will receive a graduate degree in Oral History from Columbia University in 2013.
Steven Puente (2014)
Steven Puente is licensed Social Worker and addictions counselor with 14+ years experience in in the field of addiction treatment. His work for therapeutic wilderness programs in the remote settings of Arizona and Utah eventually lead him to New York University where he received his MSW. In 2010 he joined Einstein’s Division of Substance Abuse as a counselor in their methadone maintenance treatment program. Steven is an accomplished storyteller and has been featured on the Moth Radio Hour and Podcast. Interested in the potential of personal storytelling as therapeutic intervention, he has integrated storytelling workshop, groups and programing into Methadone Maintenance Treatment and the HCV peer educator program. Steven lectures to medical students at Albert Einstein College of Medicine exploring the use of personal storytelling as a tool in health activism. He is currently enrolled at Columbia University in pursuit of a Masters in Oral History to further explore the efficacy of oral storytelling as therapeutic intervention and its effects on community building.
Elizabeth Stela McDonald (2009)
Elizabeth Stela McDonald came to OHMA from the New School University where she received her BA in anthropology. Her experience includes work as a folk Arts Coordinator at the Brooklyn Arts Council. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil conducting oral history interviews with individuals from the Japanese community, focusing on their experience as students and teachers of Taiko drumming and Japanese traditional music.
Kyana Moghadam (2012)
Kyana Moghadam is an oral historian, writer, and multimedia producer located in the San Francisco Bay area. Originally from Emeryville, California, she graduated in 2009 from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, with a BA in writing and cultural anthropology. In 2014, she received her MA in Oral History from Columbia University, where she produced and archived a multimedia collection of oral histories with Iranian American immigrant families. While working on A Country Between, Kyana received multiple arts grants and scholarships—one of which took her to Dushanbe, Tajikistan to continue with her work.
In the last decade Kyana has worked as a writer and editor with numerous publications. Her most recent projects have been with Project Bly, Rick Steves' Europe, and Moon Travel Guides. Kyana's work as a videographer has given her the chance to work with a diverse group of clients—from global nonprofits to musicians, and family owned companies.
As an oral historian, she is honored to have conducted interviews, transcribed and edited oral history transcripts, produced and published audio and video clips, and archived invaluable oral history narratives with The 1947 Partition Archive, The Fortune Society in Queens, NY, Columbia Universities' Center for Oral History Rule of Law Guantanamo Bay Oral History Project and WKCR/Center for Jazz Studies Oral History Project. She currently works as an independent oral historian and producer, working with individuals, families, community projects, and non-profit organizations.
Katy Morris (2011)
Katy Morris is a fourth-generation Wyomingite and a graduate of Smith College where she majored in the study of women and gender with a concentration in race and culture. She studies the history of sexuality in the United States with a particular focus in sexual geographies and rural spaces. As a displaced country girl, Katy is interested in understanding the intersection of lesbian and rural Westerner identities. For the past few years, she has been traveling around Wyoming interviewing lesbians in their 50s and 60s about their experiences of love and hardship in the Cowboy State. While at OHMA, she continued her research on Wyoming lesbian history and produced a 40 minute documentary featuring the stories she has collected.
Janée A. Moses (2013)
Janée A. Moses is an oral historian and Ph.D. candidate in the department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently, she is working on her dissertation about the life and times of modern-day blues women, Amina Baraka, Nina Simone and Elaine Brown. In addition, Janée is conducting oral history interviews with women who participated in radical organizations and ascribed to 20th century iterations of black radical traditions. “‘And that's the way it was planned’: Toward a History of Post-War Black Girlhood” is an oral history project that endeavours to bridge emerging discourses of Black Girlhood studies and Black Power studies and argues that black girls born during and after World War II were impacted by social, political, and economic predicaments that necessitated the emergence of the black revolutionary woman ideal during the era of Black Power. Janée’s research interests include Gender, Women, and Sexuality studies, African American literature and culture, and social movement history.
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.