Born in Pasadena, California, Erica Zora Wrightson has worked as a journalist, writer/editor, and arts administrator for newspapers and magazines, museums, and nonprofits around Los Angeles. Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have been published in the L.A. Weekly, L.A. Times, Pasadena Magazine, and Slake: Los Angeles. While pursuing her B.A. in literature and poetry at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, she spent a year in South Africa, studying poetry in Durban and documenting the stories of a group of women in Cape Town living with HIV/AIDS. Her research interests include regional cuisines, ethnomusicology, and narrative medicine.
Liza Zapol (2010)
Liza Zapol is an educator, oral historian, and screenwriter. Liza is the Director of the Pedagogy of Listening Lab at Columbia University. She teaches oral history at Columbia University with Nicki Pombier, and taught at Yale’s Public Humanities Program and The New School. Liza was a teaching artist for several years in the New York City Public School System.
Zapol has been honored to interview over 100 artists and cultural workers. Zapol was Secretarial Scholar at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art where she focused on creating oral history projects of underrepresented artists, specifically Latinx artists, Black women artists, and Native American women artists. She has created oral history projects for the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and many other organizations.
Liza is in development with two feature films she wrote with Annette Leddy about groundbreaking women artists.
Liza earned a certificate in Physical Theatre from the London International School of Performing Arts, and a certificate from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she was also a dramatic librarian. B.A. with Honors from Northwestern University. M.A. in Oral History at Columbia University.