Sheila Gilliam (2013)

Shelia Gilliam received her B.S. Ed.  from Jackson State University and her M.Ed. from Lesley University in Curriculum and Instruction. She joins OHMA after completing a two year teaching stint in the United Arab Emirates. Prior to her international experience, she has worked as a public school educator for seventeen years. Throughout her career, she has participated with the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute and Civic Voices International Memory Bank Project in which she facilitated a student led oral history project linking the Atlanta Student Movement with historic nonfiction.

Jacob Horton (2013)

Jacob Horton worked with the Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) for two years following graduation from the OHMA program. During that time, he developed content for a museum exhibition elucidating the experiences of Nantucket’s first-generation immigrant population, established a volunteer interviewing program, and organized the NHA’s standing oral history archive which holds oral records dating back to 1934.

He developed a series of social media products focused on sharing and highlighting oral history materials including a regular blog, mixed media content, and a 6-episode podcast titled “All Ears Nantucket.”

He is currently working for a biopharmaceutical corporation in Singapore as part of a multi-discipline design team, helping develop their ethnographic practices. 

Nicole JeanBaptiste (2014)

Nicole JeanBaptiste is a resident and native of the Bronx, New York with Caribbean and Southern American parentage.  She earned her B.A. degree in African and African-American Studies from Lehman College of the City University of New York.  Nicole credits her professional experience at Sauti Yetu Center for African Women and Families, a community based organization in NYC, for much of her training in youth leadership and development work, as she started out as an intern with the Girls Empowerment and Leadership Initiative (GELI) program while still working to complete her undergraduate degree.  After working as the Program Coordinator for the GELI program for over a year, Nicole left her position to accept a United States Student Fulbright Award to study and conduct research in Jamaica, West Indies.  While there, she completed a project, which sought to explore the link between Rastafarian art and craftwork and traditional African art and craftwork.  Upon her return to the United States, Nicole began her training in teaching English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) to a culturally diverse group of immigrant women living in the South Bronx.   Nicole brings with her to OHMA an undeniable commitment to girls’ and women’s empowerment and a steadfast love and appreciation for all things cultural.  She is a doula in training and a proud mama of a 6 year old son.

Kimberly Johnson (2009)

Kimberly Johnson came to OHMA with an undergraduate degree in History and German from DePauw University. While at Columbia, her work focused on the experiences of Thomas J. Watson Fellows from 1977-2003 and how their experience was changed by increased access to technology. She is currently working at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in the department of Medical Education. In her spare time, she works on oral history projects, most recently the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library's OH project, and some promotional work for the Crossing Boarders, Bridging Generations project's public programming at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

Contact: kimberlinaj@gmail.com

Anna Kaplan (2009)

Anna Kaplan came to OHMA with a BA in Anthropology with Folklore and Creative Writing minors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a MA in Anthropology from Columbia. Since graduating from OHMA, she has worked on oral history projects of the Atlanta Fox Theatre and of women activists in Chapel Hill, NC. The past four summers she has worked on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC. She is currently pursuing her PhD in History at American University, studying race relations in the southern US and the process of future generations inheriting memories of the Civil Rights Era.

Svetlana Kitto (2009)

Svetlana Kitto works as a writer, teacher and oral historian in New York City. She has an MA in Oral History from Columbia University, and currently works as the project lead on an oral history project with Jewish Theological Seminary; and as an interviewer on the Brooklyn Historical Society's Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations Oral History Project, which examines the history and experiences of mixed-heritage people and families in Brooklyn. She has taught oral history and creative writing workshops at a homeless youth drop-in center in Chinatown, NYC, a high school in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, and at the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is the writer, most recently, of an essay in Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, published by Verso Books in December 2011.

Ellen Klemme (2009)

Ellen Klemme graduated from Carleton College with BAs in History and Pre-Medical Studies and had lived across the Midwest and Middle East before arriving at Columbia's OHMA program. She studies Palestinian history; her Masters thesis investigated the practice of listening to archival oral histories, specifically paramedics' memories of responding to the collapsing World Trade Towers on September 11th, 2001. After graduating from OHMA, Ellen was the primary editor of Cesare Civetta's book "Perspectives on Toscanini" and lectured about her research at Columbia University's 2011 Oral History Summer Institute, "Rethinking 9/11: Life Stories, Cultural Memory and the Politics of Representation." She is currently living in Minnesota, developing and coordinating a tutoring program for impoverished teenagers through AmeriCorps VISTA.

Kristen La Follette (2011)

Kristen La Follette employs playwriting to reimagine interviews on stage. Her verbatim play, Pushing Against the Water: A Bay Area Muslim Women’s Oral History Project was featured in the 2019 Greenhouse Theatre Festival in San Francisco. A Glimpse Through the Curtain: Monologues of American Catholic Sisters was read in New York City and Pennsylvania. Kristen researches and writes about oral history theatre. She taught workshops for organizations, including the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and Veteran’s Oral History Project. Kristen graduated in 2012 with an M.A. in Oral History. She worked at Columbia Center for Oral History, serves on the Columbia Oral History Alumni Association Board and is a founding member of the Oral History Association’s Emerging Professionals Committee. In 2019, she earned her M.F.A. in Playwriting from San Francisco State University. She teaches creative writing and oral history at California State University Monterey Bay.

Crystal Baik (2009)

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.