Hailing from Richmond Virginia, Leigh Pennington has lived, worked, and studied around the world. She earned her BA in Anthropology, Art History, and Religion from Concordia University in Montreal. Recently she moved back to the United States after earning her Masters degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jewish Studies.
Leigh started in the field of oral history in Israel as a consultant for the Ethiopian National Project. The project unites global Jewry, the Government of Israel and the Ethiopian-Israeli community in its mission to advance the integration of Ethiopian Jews into Israeli society. Leigh developed the website for the project’s main oral history initiative, Project Ti’ud. In addition to this she also curated interviews with Ethiopian Jewish immigrants from the 80s and 90s and edited the same interviews for the purposes of publishing documentation.
When Leigh was living in Montreal she became fascinated by First Nations and Inuit history, art, spirituality, and culture. As a practicing and Torah educated Jew she noticed the similarities between Indigenous and Jewish history. At Columbia she hopes to explore some of these connections and historic community crossovers to a fuller extent in hopes of sparking more interfaith and spirituality solidarity between Indigenous groups in the United States/Canada and American Jews.
Currently Leigh works as a freelance culture content writer as well as an Op-Ed editor for the Times of Israel. Her writing has been published in major news and opinion media such as Quebec Heritage News and Tablet Magazine.
