Danielle R. Feinberg came to OHMA with an undergraduate degree in Linguistic Anthropology from Brandeis University. She first learned about oral history while helping to archive and preserve testimonies of Holocaust survivors for Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles (now the USC Shoah Foundation Institute). After relocating to New York, and changing careers (which she is very good at doing), Danielle attended culinary school and worked as a pastry chef before joining OHMA’s inaugural cohort. Through OHMA she was able to use oral history to explore and synthesize many of her lifelong interests and pursuits, including, photography, memory, identity, and food. Danielle currently works in the Department of Psychology at Barnard College.
Erica Fugger (2012)
Erica Fugger is an oral historian and peace educator based in the New York City area. She actively works with organizations, communities, and families to implement historical documentation and dialogue initiatives.
Erica previously managed Columbia University’s Center for Oral History Archives and Oral History MA program, and served as an Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. She also recently directed Washington College’s World War II public memory program, the National Home Front Project, which collaborates with communities across the United States to document and preserve civilian experiences of the war.
Erica is continuing to explore the lasting impacts of war and peace movements through doctoral work in Rutgers University-Newark’s American Studies PhD program. Her research builds upon foundations established through her MA degree in Oral History from Columbia University and her BA in History & German from Union College. Deepening her community-engaged practice, Erica currently serves as the co-director of World War 2 Peace and a graduate assistant for the Queer Newark Oral History Project.
If you are interested in learning more about Erica’s work, please reach out via the links below:
Professional Website: www.ericafugger.com
LinkedIn: Erica A. Fugger
Pronunciation: Few-grrr
Contact: peaceisnotpassive@gmail.com
Shannon Geis (2012)
Shannon Geis received her B.A. in journalism and politics from New York University. During her undergraduate studies, she became interested in radio and audio production, as well as alternative forms of documentary and storytelling. She recently completed an intensive program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, where she studied documentary radio and multimedia storytelling. She is interested in documenting the urban landscape of New York City through the voices of those that live here, as well as exploring different methods in showcasing oral histories.
Helen Gibb (2014)
Helen Gibb: Since 2011, when I attended the Summer Institute at the CCOH, it has been a dream of mine to join the OHMA program. So I'm making the trip 'across the pond' to New York from my native England. I received a BA in History from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where I lived for 4 years and it was there that I first encountered oral history. My research interests include narratives of trauma, second-generation memory and using digital technologies creatively to tell stories. While in the USA I'm also looking forward to honing my Ultimate frisbee skills with the Columbia University women's team.
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.