Natalie Naranjo-Morett (she/her/ella) was born and raised in San Diego, California where she completed her Bachelor’s degree in history with an emphasis on Latin America at UC San Diego. She also has a double minor in anthropological-archaeology and psychology. Her parents immigrated from Tijuana, Mexico when Natalie was two years old, but her family continues to cross the border often to visit their extended family. Natalie grew up traveling throughout Mexico to vacation with her family and discovered a passion for history and learning about her culture from the local communities.
During her time in OHMA, Natalie was able to grow her skills in exhibit curation and discovered various ways she could provide a platform for Latin American native communities, specifically through collaboration. In past years, Natalie has interned at the San Diego Museum of Man, now known as the Museum of Us, where she was inspired to support Indigenous people in acknowledging and rewriting their history to better represent their culture and their community.
Ariel Urim Chung (2022)
Photo by Jayon Park at “You are (not) Invited”
Ariel Urim Chung (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, technology, and oral history with an aesthetic constructed through trauma studies, embodied research, and her identity as a Korean woman in diaspora. Currently she is a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute and MAGIC Grantee at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
In her academic and artistic endeavors, Ariel aspires to strengthen solidarity within marginalized communities by creating safe spaces for difficult dialogues. In her previous research, she has focused on the relationship between performance and trauma culture to create a more conscious environment for trauma-sufferers and artists.
Currently, Ariel is experimenting, merging her academic directions and artistic mediums to create something foreign to herself. Specifically, she is exploring hyper-imaginative sites for Asian and Asian-American children and parents to engage in conversation through oral history on food. She is a little scared. and excited.
Prior to OHMA, Ariel obtained her B.A. in Theatre with Honors and minor in Computer Science at Davidson College. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, learning new recipes, and dancing!
Harpal Singh (2020)
Harpal Singh has worked as a journalist for over three decades in India and elsewhere. His latest twin-assignments were a regional satellite television news station, Day & Night News, Chandigarh, where he worked as the Editor, and its digital sibling, GoNews India, where he was Head of Operations.
He has had a long innings at India Today magazine where he started as a Trainee Journalist in 1989 and became its News Editor in 1997. He has been the Head of Forward Planning for NDTV, Systems Editor for ABNi (now CNBC), Night Editor for The Indian Express, Associate Executive Producer for Aaj Tak & Headlines Today (now India Today Television), Senior Executive Producer for NewsX and Program Editor for Al Jazeera English at Doha.
He completed his Honours in English from Delhi University's Rajdhani College in 1987 and a post-graduate programme in journalism from the Centre for Mass Media of the New Delhi YMCA the following year before entering the media.
He is a World Press Institute (WPI)-trained trainer on transparency reporting (Minnesota, 2005) and has regularly taught a variety of media subjects since 1996. He is widely travelled & considers news-gathering and creative writing his core competencies.
Harpal has taken up oral history to fulfil an abiding life goal: to create a credible and comprehensive digital repository on the Sikh Genocide of 1984 in which 2,733 persons were killed over three days in Delhi alone after the assassination of the then Indian Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, by her Sikh bodyguards. He is a victim and survivor of that pogrom.
His interests, however, extend beyond his community and what it has endured. His touchstone for shining an illuminating light on a subject is the violation of human rights, impinging of personal liberties, discrimination, and peddling of hate anywhere in the world, from Kashmir in India to Kabul in Afghanistan to Aleppo in Syria to Rakhine in Myanmar to Caracas in Venezuela.
“I’m attempting to move away from writing the ‘first rough draft of history’ to learning to write the first rough draft of oral history,” he says. “It is a leap of faith, similar to my leap into journalism over three decades ago.”
Harpal is a radio buff, but ironically, he has never worked in that space because radio news is still a State monopoly in India.
Amalia Schwarzschild (2020)
Amalia Schwarzschild (she/they) is a Brooklyn native and recent Hampshire College alum (2020). Her academic focuses include and are not limited to Latin American Studies, Afro-Latin American studies and African American studies.
While in her undergraduate studies, she completed a senior thesis devised of an ethnographic research project, fueled by questions and her interest in Afro-Mexican identity. For this thesis, Amalia traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, and conducted an oral history in Spanish with an elder in the community. She is also a recipient of the 5 College Certificate in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies.
Overall, her interests include traveling, learning languages (like Spanish), engaging in conversations, black activism, black queer activism, and continuously pushing herself to learn more about how to challenge the colonial structures around her.
Amalia is extremely excited to join the 2020 cohort, and can’t wait to see what is produced from the great minds coming together this year.
Chris Pandza (2021)
Chris Pandza graduated from OHMA in 2023, where his studies focused on using artificial intelligence to organize, analyze, and generate oral histories. Chris is interested in experimenting with tools to make large oral history corpora more accessible to end-users, including researchers and the general public.
Chris currently works in design at Incite, where he touches on projects including the Obama Presidency Oral History, I See My Light Shining, Logic(s) magazine, Assembling Voices, and MyVote Project. Prior to joining Incite, Chris held various roles in tech, media, and telecom, including managing marketing for Disney Channel, Cartoon Network, and TELUS Communications. Chris also helped produce the podcast Hazard NJ, which won the New Jersey Journalism Impact Award in 2022.
Chris holds a BA in Media and an HBA in Business Administration from Western University, Canada, and an MA in Oral History from Columbia University.
Lisa R. Cohen (2019)
Lisa R. Cohen (who uses her middle initial because her name is so ubiquitous) is excited to be joining the the OHMA cohort as a part time Masters Candidate after 30 plus years as a full time network news producer, author, documentary filmmaker, adjunct professor and university administrator.
Currently, Lisa is the Director of Prizes administering the duPont-Columbia Awards at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She taught reporting, video production, and long form narrative video classes there for over a decade, while also directing/producing documentaries; about a maximum security prison hospice staffed by the inmates for the OWN Doc Club, and about the inequities of cancer care in this country for HBO. She also authored a book about the historic disappearance of Etan Patz in 1979 that ushered in a profound change in child rearing in America. Previous to that she produced long form stories and documentaries at ABC and CBS News for over 20 years. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a dual degree in International Relations and French, neither of which she particularly made use of in her career, but realizes it was an invaluable lesson in developing critical thinking skills and the ability to speak with a guttural R.
She’s eager to learn more about the distinctions and commonalities between journalism and oral history, acquire new skills, and dive back in to helping others tell stories to create a deeper understanding of ourselves.
Meave Warnock Sheehan (2016)
During her time at OHMA, Meave Warnock Sheehan has curated an audio exhibit on a maritime history topic, using audio recordings and transcribed interviews from archived collections at the Brooklyn Historical Society and the Hoboken Historical Museum. Meave first learned about oral history in 2013 when she was enrolled in a master’s degree program in Liberal Studies.
Meave's previous jobs have been in local journalism, education, and government. In Summer 2019, she was selected for and attended a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) workshop for educators to study the early railroad system in the U.S.
Recently, Meave joined the Hudson County (NJ) Genealogical and Historical Society and the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York. As the result of her beginning attempts to trace her genealogy, Meave has located the grave of her Civil War ancestor, a Union soldier who served in the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery Regiment.
Meave continues to learn about audio editing and archival practices and hopes to use solid audio skills, strong narrative choices and a highly developed appreciation for language to further ‘‘activate the archives.’’ Her research interests include local history, labor history, radio history, and podcasting.
Jennie Morrison (2019)
Jennie is a Midwesterner at heart, with a little bit of Pacific Northwest and New York influence. After growing up in Michigan and graduating from Kenyon College in Ohio with a BA in American Studies, she worked with children, youth, and families in public educational and non-profit settings in Seattle. Youth development and community engagement work challenged Jennie to think about how identity, power, privilege, and voice shape both individual and collective stories.
In 2017, Jennie relocated to NYC to attend Columbia School of Social Work in hopes of learning about the impacts of trauma in order to design more holistic and responsive youth programming. During her studies, she became increasingly interested in the concept of resilience on individual and community levels. The OHMA workshops and trainings around campus always caught her eye, and she is now excited to explore how oral history can support advocacy and facilitate systemic change efforts.
Jennie has several research interests that stem from her background in youth development, social work, and American Studies. In particular, she is eager to explore connections between the experiences of workers in the varying human services, child welfare, and public education fields within the United States, particularly given recent findings about burnout.
Vanessa Harper (2021)
Vanessa K. Harper has lived and worked in Cuba as a researcher, producer, documentarian, and facilitator of collaborative agreements between U.S. and Cuban institutions since 2005.
Read MoreBronte Gosper (2021)
Bronte Gosper was born and raised in the small town of Orange in Australia. She is a proud Wiradjuri woman who is passionate about making lasting change for Indigenous communities through creating publicly accessible oral historical documentaries. She has recently written and directed a play 'Yiraway (Mirage)' that was an exploration of the illusions that pervade settler Australia seen through the eyes of a Wiradjuri woman.
She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in History. Bronte has interned with Killer Films/Moxie Pictures in New York and completed a semester of exchange at Barnard College. She has a keen interest in Chinese history and Mandarin language and spent 2 months in Shanghai in 2018, studying mandarin at Fudan University. In 2020, Bronte interned with the Federal Minister for Indigenous Australians, where she led a community engagement project that informed a research paper investigating the unique challenges faced by indigenous women. I hope to produce a work through OHMA that will give me the opportunity to elevates Indigenous womens' voices at home and in the US. Through recording the histories of Indigenous women involved in advocacy work in the late 20th Century, Bronte hopes to strengthen ties between Native American women and Indigenous Australian women's organisations. She hopes that this documentary will create an archive for future advocates and policy makers while informing the Australian public about issues that are often told for Indigenous women, rather than by them. For the past year, she has worked at FIrst Nations Media as a project support officer. As part of this work, she co-authored a research paper exploring how Indigenous community broadcasters responded to COVID-19. She briefly lived in Jamaica and wants to return as soon as she can!
Her passions include acting, writing plays and music, singing and dancing with friends.
Sydney Mann (2021)
Sydney Mann is a talented communications professional, freelance producer, and public interviewer with a passion for storytelling. Sydney has a multi-faceted background in digital media, including professional experiences in social media research, audio-visual production, and campaign development.
Sydney graduated from Cornell University in 2018 with a degree in American Studies focused on the relationship between society and mass media in the United States throughout the 20th century, coupled with a minor in English. During her undergraduate career, Sydney interned with American Master’s at WNET: an Emmy-award-winning docu-series profiling America’s most influential artists. Sydney also worked alongside the Creative and Cultural Insights team at Viacom, developing communications strategies for the next generation of digital consumers.
A trained dialogue facilitator with Cornell’s Intergroup Dialogue Project at Cornell (IDP), a program that makes use of critical dialogue to make meaning across differences, Sydney then became a Digital Assistant for the organization, working across the program’s communications channels to expand its digital presence. Subsequently, Sydney worked at HarperCollins Children’s Publishing as an Advertising Assistant, delivering over 140+ campaigns per season.
Inspired by her experiences as a dialogue facilitator with IDP, Sydney focused her studies at OHMA on interview methodology. Her thesis explored the roles of power, social identity, and cooperative learning during the oral history interview.
With her OHMA degree, Sydney has continued to produce creative and influential stories for audio. Last summer, she hosted Cornell University’s podcast “Fresh from the Hill: Inside Stories of Noteworthy Cornellians,” and most recently, she conducted oral history interviews for NYU’s media production department on a freelance basis.
A passionate and empathetic storyteller, Sydney hopes to advance her career as a producer creating stories across radio, documentary, and podcast formats. In her free time, Sydney loves to play piano and write. You can check out Sydney's work at www.sydneywmann.com.
Dharini Chand (2021)
Dharini Chand (she/her) is an archivist based in Mumbai, India.
As someone who has always been inclined towards listening and observing, Dharini greatly appreciates the unique life stories people have. She sees them as an immense, untapped source of knowledge that needs to be timely and safely recorded. She regularly finds herself using the voice recorder app on her phone to record stories from people around her. Though an amateur attempt, her findings formed the base for some of her research work at college and have been instrumental in motivating her towards seeking a focused academic understanding of oral history.
Dharini has received a B.A. with a double major in History and Psychology from Sophia College, Mumbai and a M.A. in Ancient Indian Culture from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Alongside her M.A., she began working at Cipla Archives where she discovered her love for archiving. Her primary role of building and managing a personal archive gave her the opportunity to explore life stories in a new way - through archival objects. In her six years of work, she has closely seen how the intersection of archival objects and oral history brings about a fuller picture that would have otherwise been missed. She wants to further explore this, as well as the intersection of narrative inquiry and oral history through her future research work.
Dharini’s goal through oral history is simply ‘ask before you can’t’. She broadly identifies her research interests as - stories which garner interest, stories which garner thought and stories which garner change. She looks forward to first building a solid theoretical foundation in oral history and then exploring new ways to approach it.
Caiwei Chen (2021)
Caiwei Chen is a bilingual storyteller, journalist and writer originally from Hubei, China. Before joining OHMA, she was a freelance journalist covering culture, tech and their intersections on Chinese internet. Her work has appeared on publications including Rolling Stone, South China Morning Post, Protocol, SupChina and SixthTone among others, with topics ranging from female stand-up comedians, short form dramas, Chinese masculinity and Beijing’s underground music scene.
Caiwei’s interest in oral history originated from the trauma that carries across generations in her own family. After spending some time in the media industry, she is excited to continue her studies at Columbia University in order to explore topics including collective memory, cultural transmission in the digital age, audio storytelling and narrative art.
Caiwei is part of Marcast, a Chinese podcast network that aims to create high-quality audio content for global clients and explore the possibilities of audio storytelling. She is the host of Redirect, a cultural critique podcast covering cross-cultural internet trends in Mandarin. Before starting her own, Caiwei worked as a producer for Tech Buzz China, a podcast that takes monthly deep dives into China’s leading tech companies and innovative sectors. She also contributes regularly to Chaoyang Trap, a newsletter about everyday life on the Chinese internet.
In her spare time, Caiwei is a pop culture junkie and avid reader. Caiwei graduated cum laude from China Agricultural University and University of Colorado, Denver with B.A.s in Communications. Learn more about her at www.chencaiwei.com. You can also find her @CaiweiC on Twitter, or other random corners on the internet.
Hannah (Han) Powell (2021)
Han Powell (they/she) is a multimedia artist and filmmaker joining OHMA from unceded Tocobaga land in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Han graduated from Rollins College in 2018 with a degree in Critical Media and Cultural Studies, and Sexuality, Women’s, and Gender Studies, where they received the Activism and Social Justice Award and Sojourner Truth Award for Combined Academic and Activist Work. Their thesis documentary film, The Pulse of a City, explored the impact of hate-motivated violence on LGBTQ+ bars and clubs in the wake of the Pulse shooting in Orlando, and solidified their belief in storytelling and oral history as a vessel for healing and community-building.
They studied abroad in the Netherlands, where they filmed a documentary centering the experiences of parents raising children in queer, non-nuclear households and highlighting the heteronormative obstacles and limitations of Dutch family law. Han has spent the past three years working in the LGBTQ+ nonprofit field, first as the Pride Coordinator for Equality Florida, then as an LGBTQ+ Program Specialist at Metro Inclusive Health, where they got to realize their dream of planning and directing a queer summer camp.
Their work is grounded in the tradition of queer Southern organizing and movement building, and they believe that recording and learning from our collective histories is one of our most powerful tools for liberation. Han is currently working on an oral history project documenting the stories of queer and trans Floridians doing organizing, activist, and creative work in their communities (queerflorida.life).
Ornella Baganizi (2021)
Ornella Baganizi (she/hers) was born in Canada, but is originally from Rwanda. In the Unites States she considers Maryland home. She graduated from American University (Class of 2019). Ornella’s academic interests include Africana Studies, colonial and post-colonial histories of Africa, and decolonization theory. She is eager to explore how oral history can be used as a tool to decolonize education specifically as it relates to producing knowledge of Africa that is nuanced and inclusive of Africans and personal memory.
While in undergraduate studies, she studied abroad in Arusha, Tanzania where she started learning Swahili through a Boren Scholarship, and Nairobi, Kenya. Her senior year she designed and led students on a two-week service-learning trip to Arusha, Tanzania to explore the country’s history of pan-Africanism and the interplay of marginalized identities, such as women, the youth, and people of the Maasai community. After graduating, Ornella moved back to Tanzania, this time to Mwanza, as a Princeton in Africa Fellow to work for an NGO called Mainsprings.
Her senior year she designed and led students on a two-week service-learning trip to Arusha, Tanzania to explore the country’s history of pan-Africanism and the interplay of marginalized identities, such as women, the youth, and people of the Maasai community. After graduating, Ornella moved back to Tanzania, this time to Mwanza, as a Princeton in Africa Fellow to work for an NGO called Mainsprings.
In this program, Ornella hopes to research and archive her family’s history; from her grandmother being one of the many mixed-race children in Rwanda separated from their mother and brought to live in Belgium, her father being the first person in his family to received a PhD, and many of her family members experiences during the 1994 Genocide.
Ornella writes poetry and has recently delved into photography. She hopes to cultivate her artistic practices and incorporate these mediums into her thesis project.
Ornella speaks French, English and Swahili. She is excited to join the 2021 OHMA cohort, meeting new people and learning about their stories.
Yiwen Li (2021)
Yiwen Li was born and raised in Jiangsu, China. She graduated from Peking University with double majors in History and Diplomacy in 2020. Since her sophomore year, she’s found her interest in the social history of modern and contemporary China. She believes that the most fascinating thing about history is that every little change in the lives of ordinary people combined to create such a great change in the whole society. As a research method, oral history is particularly critical when studying social history, especially the history of ordinary people.
In 2017, Yiwen took part in a group organized by Peking University and The Kuok Group to do research on Modes of Eliminating Poverty in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia. There, she learned some oral interview techniques from the group members majored in Sociology. With their help, she interviewed the villagers from 3 villages in Ulanqab about recent local changes and wrote a research report. This was her first time to learn how to use oral materials. One year later, she went to Yunnan Province with teachers and students from the Department of History to investigate on the role of tourism in eliminating poverty in Yunnan minority inhabited areas. In this program, she proposed that they could interview the traditional craftsmen and she was in charge of the interview. In addition, in 2020-2021, as a member of the Oral History Program - "People from Peking University" , she carried on oral history interview with Chuanxi Zhang, a retired professor from the Department of History of PKU. Professor Zhang shared a lot about his family history and his early experiences of studying and participating in student movements. All these things are little known in the past but can help us glimpse a corner of modern Chinese society.
Yiwen is thrilled to join the 2021 OHMA cohort to learn more systematically on oral history method and theory and get more prepared for her future research on the social history of modern and contemporary China.
Martina Lancia (2021)
Born and raised in Rome, Martina has a background in contemporary history, business and international cooperation, with degrees from Sapienza University of Rome and LUISS. Having finished the program at OHMA, Martina is set to begin a PhD in Italian Studies at Brown University, with a focus on Pierpaolo Pasolini, the Roman peripheries, and oral histories of Rome.
Martina’s passion for oral history stems from the work of Ascanio Celestini, a playwright and performer who uses oral history to create live shows and films steeped in the contemporary history of both Rome and Italy. After spending time working in the Circolo Gianni Bosio archive on the interviews about the Massacre of Fosse Ardeatine, her thesis on the same topic examined the impact this event left in the individual memories of the women and collective memory of German occupied Rome.
Her research interests vary from Rome and its contemporary history to ethnomusicology and family stories.
Martina is an avid reader, especially Post-War Italian literature like Pierpaolo Pasolini, as well as 20th century American literature like Steinbeck, Hemingway and Salinger. She also loves comics like Zerocalcare, Hugo Pratt and Gipi.
The website which houses the digital exhibit of her OHMA these will remain active, with updates to be added from future projects and interviews.
Casey Dooley (2020)
Casey is an oral historian, writer, and inveterate inquirer whose work is motivated by the extraordinary lives of everyday humans as well as the spaces with which they interact. Merging academic curiosity with two decades as an advertising copywriter and chatbot conversation designer, she’s as interested in the history as she is in the ways it might be shared.
Casey’s work focuses on architecture, class, community, and individual experience. In listening to people share their memories of how they’ve lived and where they’ve been, she finds connection, meaning, and new ways to understand the world at large.
Some of her research interests include:
Oral history as a conflict-resolution tool that encourages dynamic conversations across cultures and through generations.
Alternative interpretations of events, individuals, and experiences that are often condemned or considered contentious. (Or, why jury duty can be a blessing.)
Those who feel called to serve, from members of the clergy to politicians, firefighters, activists, and beyond.
Bridges between social stratification, among them community gardens, mixed-income housing, and spectator sports.
Birth and death doulas who serve as stewards at the start of life and shepherds at the end.
Architectural palimpsests as works of visual art that provide maps to the memories of people and places in transition.
Casey holds a BA in Journalism from the college that gave her the scholarship that made it possible, as well as an MA in Oral History from Columbia University. When she’s not talking to strangers, Casey enjoys mudlarking, romanticizing Victorian life, delighting in sleight-of-hand magic, scouring microhistories, and being the unofficial hypewoman of the American Midwest.
Bridget Bartolini (2018)
Bridget Bartolini is an oral historian, educator, socially engaged artist, and writer who specializes in New York City history, place-based storytelling, and narrator profiles.
Read MoreRebecca Kiil (2018)
Rebecca Kiil is a writer, oral historian, and filmmaker. Rebecca earned a B.A. in English from Wake Forest University and an M.A. in oral history at Columbia University, and she attended the Salt Institute for graduate studies in documentary film photography. For almost a decade, Rebecca has been working to document the life histories of family and community members who fled their homeland of Estonia during World War II to escape the brutal Soviet and Nazi regimes, then lived for several years in various displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany and Sweden before resettling in the U.S. Before Rebecca's maternal grandmother passed away in 2020 at the age of 102, Rebecca spent seven years filming, researching, and helping document her grandmother’s story, much of which her grandmother hadn't previously shared with anyone. In her oral history work, Rebecca explores themes such as intergenerational trauma, embodied memory, women and war, ethical loneliness, forced migration/displacement, and the refugee regime. Most recently, she has been exploring her obligation, both as human and oral historian, to individuals who have been forcibly disappeared or otherwise silenced and how the practice of oral history can be applied to capture their stories.