Suzanne Snider (Founder/Director, Oral History Summer School 2012-) is a writer, documentarian, and educator whose work is deeply influenced by oral history theory and practice. Her most recent projects have taken the shape of sound installation, essays, and archive design. In 2012, she founded Oral History Summer School, an interdisciplinary training program in upstate New York. She consults frequently for institutions and project teams, collaborating with organizations including the National Public Housing Museum, MoMA, Center for Reproductive Rights and the Prison Public Memory Project. As an interviewer, she has worked for Columbia University's Center for Oral History Research, New York Academy of Medicine, HBO Productions, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. You can read more about OHSS’s collaborations, here. Her own oral history projects have addressed disappearing labor forces, rehabilitative medicine, parapsychology, and feminist presses (supported by the Radcliffe Institute/Schlesinger Library Oral History Grant). Her writing/audio work appear in The Guardian, The Believer, Legal Affairs, and The Washington Post, along with several anthologies and artist catalogs; she received a 2011 commission from Triple Canopy for New Media Reporting. Snider teaches at the New School, Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies and served as a visiting lecturer at Columbia University (OHMA) in spring 2014. Prior to her work with adult learners, she taught in the New York City public school system (pre-K through 6th), and developed arts curriculum for visually impaired students at the New York Institute for Special Education. With support from the Yaddo Corporation, the MacDowell Colony and the UCross Foundation Center, she is completing her first book, The Revival. She received an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and dual BA in Literature and Dance from Wesleyan University. She is currently studying Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy.
Alexandra Kelly Berman is the Manager of Adult Programming and Outreach Services at The New York Public Library where she works with library staff across 88 neighborhood branches to introduce programs for local adult communities. Alexandra began at NYPL by developing and leading the successful multi-branch Community Oral History Project across over 25 city communities. Before working at NYPL, she was a Facilitator at StoryCorps and received an M.A. from the School of Media Studies at The New School, where she also acted as Director of Student Services + Engagement. She has also launched several youth media projects around New York City, including an oral history project in Crown Heights, The Engage Media Lab program at The New School, and a documentary filmmaking project at Brooklyn Children's Museum.
Alissa Rae Funderburk is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Oral Historian for the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. In her position, she maintains an oral history archive dedicated to the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of African American history and culture. Inspired by her work at the center, she has developed a workshop on the complexities of transcribing Black voices that she first presented for the OHMA Anti-Oppression Oral History Training Workshops last summer. She is a native New Yorker and holds an MA in Oral History as well as a BA in Anthropology from Columbia University.
Alisa Del Tufo has worked at the intersection of personal and social change for over three decades by partnering with individuals and communities to surface the voices of those who are marginalized and whose insights and experiences are ignored. Using oral history, narrative and other participatory forms of engagement her work has focused on gender and racial justice. She is the founder of several organizations: Sanctuary for Families, CONNECT, Threshold Collaborative and co founded Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change with Sarah Loose. She has an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary and is the recipient of Revson, Rockefeller and Ashoka Fellowships.
Annie Reynolds (December Mini Intensive 2021, Program Coordinator 2022 - ) is the Program Coordinator for Oral History Summer School. Her interests in collaborative ethnography and trauma informed education–through a BA in anthropology and working for a trauma-healing arts nonprofit–led her to oral history’s capacity to expand language, form, and authorship. She has deep interest in prison-based arts programming, most recently as Primary Researcher for Arts in Corrections New York State, where she has facilitated oral history workshops in NY state prisons. From 2016 - 2020, she was a member of Liberation Literacy, a prison-based writing and reading group in Portland, OR. She facilitates a dream group in Hudson, New York (where she currently lives) and is working towards a certificate in Spiritual Direction.
Ben Harbert (Collecting and Composing 2015) joined the music faculty at Georgetown University after receiving his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His Ph.D. research was on music in three Louisiana prisons. His current research interests also include documentary film, international extreme metal, and music of the Near East. His theoretical approach connects investigations of musical experiences to analyses of musical phenomena. Harbert has been a teaching fellow at University of California, Los Angeles and a lecturer at Pomona College as well as a resident artist at the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County. Before returning to academia, he directed the guitar, percussion and music theory programs at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. Harbert is a concert-level performer on guitar, Near Eastern ‘ud, and Indian tabla. He has led a number of performance groups including the Los Angeles Electric 8 and extended rock ensemble arrangements of Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement.
Ciera Dudley (Education Narratives Project Coordinator, 2021 - ) is an educator, cartographer, and illustrator based in Santa Cruz, California. She has a background in urban planning and education, which inform her oral history interests in multi-generational housing justice movements and mutual aid networks. She currently coordinates the Education Narratives Project at OHSS and facilitates storytelling workshops with The Moth. Ciera is also a member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a collective of activists, critical cartographers, and oral historians documenting dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes.
Daniel Cogan, NP is a palliative care nurse practitioner with Aspire Health, the nation’s largest provider of non-hospice community-based palliative care. He is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Nursing, and has advanced certification in geriatrics as well as hospice and palliative care. He holds a Certificate in Bioethics and Medical Humanities from the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics.
DAO X. TRAN was born in Mỹ Tho—but made in the USA. She’s passionate about democratizing the stories being heard and finds a curiosity about our world essential. She is the editorial director at the nonprofit Voice of Witness, uplifting and amplifying the voices of people impacted by—and fighting against—injustice. Dao is also on the editorial board of Haymarket Books. When not marking up manuscripts—or scouting projects and partnerships—she’s raising a spirited teenager and a poodle-terrier-shih-tzu on the land of Canarsie and Munsee Lenape peoples (Brooklyn).
Dina Zempsky LCSW (Mixed/Memory 2015), currently works as a Program Director at the national oral history project StoryCorps and is responsible for the developing The Memory Loss Initiative; a program to support the recording of stories of people with Alzheimer's and related dementias. Best practices from this program can also be related to recording interviews with people with traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's and other areas of cognitive loss. By training, Dina is a geriatric social worker with a private practice with the elderly and their families. She is also a consultant to the PBS documentary film, Nine to Nine about one family's caregiving journey.
DW Gibson (Oral History and Writing 2017) is the author of the awarding-winning book The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century and Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy. He shared a National Magazine Award for his work on “This Is the Story of One Block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn” for New York Magazine. His work has also appeared in Harper’s,The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and The Caravan. Gibson has been a contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered and “There Goes the Neighborhood,” a podcast co-produced by WNYC and The Nation. His documentary film, Not Working, a companion to the book, is available through Films Media Group. His directorial debut, Pants Down, premiered at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Gibson serves as director of Writers Omi at Ledig House in Ghent, New York, and he co-founded Sangam House, a writers’ residency in India, along with Arshia Sattar.
Eugenie Mukeshimana (OHSS Intensive 2014, Interviewing Survivors 2013) is the Founder and Executive Director of Genocide Survivors Support Network (GSSN), a NJ-based nonprofit organization that serves immigrant genocide survivors in America. As one of the leading voices among survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she frequently presents on genocide and war topics and travels around the country to speak about her experiences during the genocide. In an effort to gain a better understanding of current and future challenges of living with the memories of the genocide, Eugenie began to conduct filmed interviews with Holocaust survivors about their post-holocaust experiences. Eugenie helps survivors to open up and tell their stories often for the first time and sometimes before total strangers. She also helps them manage the post-disclosure range of emotions. Her work with refugees as a freelance telephonic language and cultural interpreter for leading language service companies helped her uncover serious communication challenges faced by refugees and service providers across the country and has contributed a chapter in Children and Families Affected by Armed Conflicts in Africa: Implications and Strategies for Helping Professionals in the United States. NASW Press 2012.Eugenie holds a Bachelor’s in Social Work from the College of St. Rose in Albany, NY. She was a 2012 Human Rights Advocate Program fellow at Columbia University. She is a mother of one daughter born during the genocide and lives in South Orange, NJ.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist, and artist who writes and thinks at the intersection of identity, politics, sexuality, and gender. Her academic work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journal and covered by press outlets such as the Washington Post, Associated Press, and NPR. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone, An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072--a novel published with Common Notions Press in 2022. She received her PhD in Sociology from New York University in 2019 and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.
Emma Rose Brown (b. 1991) is a Queens-based performer, multidisciplinary artist, and oral historian working in the field of dance. She assists in the preservation and production of the Dance Oral History Project at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and is the Archives Coordinator for the Community Library of Voice and Sound in Hudson, NY. She is a three time SU CASA artist-in-residence through Queens Council on the Arts where she has taught experimental documentary arts to older adults. Her work takes her between the urban and the rural. Emma has facilitated participatory community scores at the Rochester Folk Arts Guild and at the Abode Farm in New Lebanon, NY and presented work at GIBNEY, Movement Research, New York Live Arts, The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought and The School of Making Thinking. Emma is an MFA candidate in Integrated Media Art at Hunter College.
Housing is a Human Right (Rachel Falcone, Michael Premo) (OHSS Intensive 2013) is a creative storytelling project that aims to help connect diverse communities around housing, land, and the dignity of a place to call home. We create a space for people to share stories of their community and ongoing experiences trying to obtain or maintain a place to call Home. We are building a collection of intimate, viscerally honest narratives exploring the complex fabric of community and the human right to housing and land, painting a living portrait of human rights.Stories are recorded in sound in the tradition of oral history and shared as audio stories, photographs and multimedia across multiple platforms-including interactive exhibitions in unconventional spaces & broadcasts via traditional and new media outlets.
Jeffrey Lependorf (Collecting and Composing 2015) received a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree from Oberlin Conservatory. A composer of operas and chamber music, he is also a certified master of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese bamboo flute. His music has been performed around the globe—literally: a recording of his "Night Pond" for solo shakuhachi launched into space when the shuttle Atlantis took off on May 15, 1997 and remained for a year aboard the Russian space station Mir. He began shakuhachi study with Kinko master of shakuhachi Yoshinobu Taniguchi, who gave him the venerable name "Kokû" ("empty nothingness"). Jeffrey also serves as Director of the Music Omi International Musicians Residency at the Omi International Arts Center here in Columbia Count: www.omiartscenter.org. Some of his recordings can be found on iTunes and Amazon.com, and his “Masterpieces of Western Music” audio-course, part of Barnes & Noble’s “Portable Professor” series, can be downloaded at audible.com.
Jennie Morrison (ENP Project Scheduler, Coordinator, 2020-2021) has a background in oral history, non-profit communications, social work, and K-16 education. She has worked in a variety of settings, including K-12 public schools, non-profit organizations, and university campuses. She received her introduction to the art of oral history through OHSS, and then continued her training through the Columbia University Oral History Master of Arts program. She is particularly interested in using oral history to foster conversation about the dynamics of teaching, learning, and care, which she began exploring during her time with the OHSS Education Narratives Project.
Jeremy Thal (Collecting and Composing 2015) is co-founder and co-director of Found Sound Nation, a New-York based music organization that leverages the power of collaborative sound-making to help build strong, just, healthy communities. With Chris Marianetti, Jeremy co-designed Found Sound Nation projects in NYC, Haiti, Zimbabwe, China, New Orleans, Mexico, Indonesia, Switzerland, and elsewhere. He also co-directs OneBeat and the Dosti Music Project, two incubators for music-based social entrepreneurship where innovative musicians from around the world collaboratively create original music, and develop strategies for arts-based social engagement bridging cultural and geographic divides. He studied ethnomusicology, French horn, and Chinese at Northwestern University, and continues to work as a performer, playing in major music festivals and obscure bookstores around the world. As a horn player and multi-instrumentalist, he has recorded and toured with indie rock heavyweights Neutral Milk Hotel and The National, and leads his own band, Briars of North America. Jeremy has served as a lead teaching artist at the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, working with incarcerated youth. A founder of ZeroBit Music, he composes and produces music for film, theater, web sites, and video games.
Karen Gardner (OHSS Assistant 2013) is an aspiring writer. Her work thus far explores new analyses of microeconomic development theory, including critiques within labor economics, urban economics, and community-based development. Her work has included an interview-based project in the Ilam region of eastern Nepal analyzing the power dynamics involved in a tea factory’s conversion to organic production. A subsequent project analyzes USAID’s agricultural technology interventions in Nepal. Aside from writing, she is also an aspiring farmer, baker, and marathon runner. She received her Bachelor’s in Economics at Bard College.
Laura Checkoway (Oral History and the Documentary Film 2013) has penned revealing celebrity profiles and investigative features for numerous publications and is the former senior editor of Vibe magazine. Her first book, My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep’s Prodigy, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2011 and shortlisted as one of the best music books of the year by NPR. In 2011, she directed and produced a series of documentary segments for PBS World. Currently, she’s producing video content for Google and Toyota/Scion. Her first feature length documentary, Lucky, is in post-production.
Lauren Elizabeth Kelly (Archives/Production Coordinator 2016, Program Coordinator 2016, Oral History and Radio 2015) is a filmmaker with a background in ballet and postmodern dance, interested in experimental practices, cognition, PTSD, creativity, and humor. She holds an M.A. in Media Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Studies, both from The New School University, and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has screened at festivals and galleries around New York and at backup_Festival Weimar Germany. Lauren is currently based in Burlington, VT, where she is working on three films: a documentary about addiction and treatment in Vermont, a short film portrait of her mother as she moves from one home to another following a stroke, and a portrait of an antique shop owner as he moves out of his shop to make way for condos in the South End of Burlington.
Liza Zapol is an artist, oral historian, and documentary producer. Liza Zapol manages and curates the production of new oral histories for the oral history program at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, where she is the Robert and Arlene Kogod Secretarial Scholar. Liza has finalized the Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project, co-created a symposium of the same name with the Whitney Museum, overseen the ongoing acquisition of oral histories, and has trained the national team of collectors in oral history methodology. Previously, Liza worked for the Whitney Museum of American Art, creating oral history projects on the Whitney ISP and the Whitney Education Program. She also produced films about the Whitney Women, Vito Acconci, and created the Whitney Education Community Advisory Network. Liza created the oral history program for the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. She has also worked with the National Building Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Massachusetts General Hospital. Zapol started her career in performance. Recently, she has collaborated with oral historian Nicki Pombier Berger to create Push Play, an experimental workshop for interviewers to enliven the practice of oral history as art. Liza has also worked with theater director Julie Kline (Seniors and the City), scenic designer Cameron Anderson, and Elevator Repair Service Theater. Zapol has taught at Columbia University and the New School, and lectures on the intersection of oral history and art.
LJ Amsterdam (Experimental Ethnographies 2018, Collecting and Composing 2014) is a strategist for organizations devoted to social transformation. Deeply steeped in direct action and dance, LJ offers methods of strengthening bodies to take risks, arranging bodies to take space, and bringing bodies together to belong. Over the past decade she has trained over 10,000 people to take action. Previously a Co-Director at the seminal training organization the Ruckus Society, and a Lead Trainer for the Center for Story-Based Strategy, LJ has worked behind-the-scenes with power-building groups in many of the defining campaigns and movements for climate, racial, and economic justice. She is currently a Senior Fellow at Future Currents where she leads the Direct Action Innovation Lab and is part of the Strengthening Organizing Project team. A former heavy metal DJ, LJ was inspired to study ethnomusicology after she read Christopher Small’s book “Musicking,” which positions music as an activity, not a thing. She received her B.A. and M.A. at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University and her work on young Indigenous hip hop artists has since been published in several iterations. More recently, she co-authored a history of the climate justice movement through poster art and a love letter to all those in the streets calling for a ceasefire. Born and based in NYC, LJ has also spent time in Hudson, co-founding Social Justice Leadership Academy in 2014 at Kite’s Nest.
Lucinda (Lucy) Segar is a writer, educator and dancer living in Hudson, NY. She earned her MFA in writing from Columbia University and her BA in writing and dance from Oberlin College. Lucy teaches multidisciplinary, writing, movement, conflict resolution workshops for children at Kite's Nest, and is a founding member of the Hudson Sloop Club. She also teaches expository and creative writing at The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City (SUNY). Lucy participated in the OHSS Intensive in 2015, and is acting as program assistant for OHSS 2016.
Mark Menjívar is a San Antonio based artist and Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. His art practice primarily consists of creating participatory projects while being rooted in photography, oral history, archives, and social action. He attended McLennan Community College, holds a BA in Social Work from Baylor University and an MFA in Social Practice from Portland State University. Mark is the artist-in-residence with the Texas After Violence Project, a public memory archive that fosters deeper understandings of the impacts of state violence. He is also a member of Borderland Collective, which utilizes collaborations between artists, educators, youth, and community members to engage complex issues and build space for diverse perspectives, meaningful dialogue, and modes of creation around border issues.
Meral Agish (Technical Assistant, 2013) works as an independent oral historian and as a fundraiser, event planner and grant writer for the Drug Policy Alliance, Sandy Storylines, and other nonprofit organizations. She is a graduate of Yale University and recently completed the certificate program at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, where she worked on oral history projects with Vietnam veterans, long-married couples, and former residents of Durham’s demolished Hayti district. In 2013, Meral will travel to China and Japan to produce a multimedia documentary about the Tatar diaspora in the Communist era.
M.E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. Her second book, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, was published by Pluto Press in Spring of 2023. Her co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, was published by Common Notions in August 2022. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Her writing has been published by Work, Employment and Society, Social Movement Studies, Endnotes, Homintern, Commune, and Invert.
Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. Find her on twitter @genderhorizon.
Michael Garofalo (Oral History and Radio 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) works in sound to produce both narrative and abstract works of audio documentary and musical composition. As editor-at-large and podcast host for the public media project StoryCorps, Michael crafts minimalist short stories from archival interview material that highlight the poetry of everyday speech and experience. His previous roles include producer, senior producer, and executive producer. As a musician and composer, Michael uses analog synthesizers, lamellophones, guitars, field recordings, and found sounds to create music that resides in a sonic territory between incidental music and eccentric synthpop. He was a founding member of the improvising trio Latitude/Longitude (active 2004-2010). Michael’s radio work has been honored twice by the George Foster Peabody Awards, most recently in 2011 for his work commemorating the 9/11 attacks, including audio content featured at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City, for which he was also awarded a Columbia-Dupont Award. In 2011, Michael was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Freelance radio/podcast production clients include This American Life, Gimlet, NPR, KPCC, Reverse Shot, and Film Comment.
Nicki Pombier Berger (Mixed/Memory 2015) is an oral historian, educator and interdisciplinary artist. As a freelance oral historian, she primarily works at the intersection of disability and social change, through projects such as the TILL Living Legacy Project, Here: Stories from Selinsgrove and KenCrest, and Nothing About Us Without Us. Nicki currently teaches at the New School for Drama, and has taught oral history workshops at, among other venues, Columbia University, Bethel University's New York Center for Art and Media Studies, and Oral History Summer School, where she taught sessions on Mixed Ability interviewing in 2015. She is the Founding Editor of Underwater New York, a digital arts journal of writing, art, and music inspired by the waterways of New York City and the objects submerged within them, for which she has curated events and excursions in all five boroughs. Since spring 2015, Nicki has been a Research Fellow on the Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project. From 2010-2013, she worked at StoryCorps, where she led the National Teachers Initiative and worked on the youth development program StoryCorpsU. She has a Bachelor of Science in the Foreign Service from Georgetown University (2001), a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (2009), and a Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University (2013). She invites you to join her in Risk Listening, an oral history experiment.
Nichole Canuso (Nichole Canuso Dance) is a choreographer and performer experimenting with the participation of audience bodies and personal narratives through a cross-pollination of artistic mediums. Canuso is dedicated to ensemble-generated processes, aiming to create connections across distances and life experiences. Based in Philadelphia, Canuso founded Nichole Canuso Dance Company in 2004 and is currently a faculty member of the MFA program at The University of the Arts / Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training (APT). She is currently exploring the interfaces of live, embodied presence with emerging technologies with a focus on the intimacy and power of listening. Her current project (Being/With) brings together two solo participants at a time – each in a separate location – in poetic encounters of live feed video imagery, movement prompts and interview structures. Support for her work includes The National Endowment for the Arts, The Knight Foundation, a Bessie Shoenberg First Light Commission, The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and National Dance Projects/New England Foundation for the Arts. Presentations of her work include New York Live Arts, American Repertory Theater, Los Angeles Performance Practice, The International Festival for Art and Ideas, Onésimo Festival in Guadalajara, Mexico and artistic residency support includes Maggie Allessee National Center for Choreography, MacDowell, Millay, Orchard Project, NCCAkron and BiLateral Residency (Budapest, Hungary). She is a 2017 Pew fellow and 2021 NEXUS/NYSAF recipient. nicholecanusodance.org
Rae Garringer (they/them) is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, and now lives a few counties away on S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and Shawandasse Tula (Shawnee) lands with a large family of animals. Rae is the founder of Country Queers: a multimedia oral history project documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013, and a proud member of the National Council of Elders Oral History Podcast team. Rae is currently working on two books: Country Queers: The Story of a DIY Oral History Project for Haymarket Books, and To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two Spirit Writers on Race, Gender, and Home in Appalachia for the University Press of Kentucky. When not working with stories Rae spends a lot of time failing at keeping goats in fences, swimming in the river, and two stepping around their trailer.
Rochelle Hoi-Yiu Kwan (aka YiuYiu 瑶瑶) is a cultural organizer, artist, and oral history educator based on Lenape land in NYC's Manhattan Chinatown. She takes on her childhood name YiuYiu 瑶瑶 as a researcher and DJ for Chinatown Records 華埠錄音. Bringing together art and history, she leads oral history projects and training with Think!Chinatown, Self Evident, and a wide variety of academic and community classrooms that have taught her so much all along the way.
Ry Garcia-Sampson (Brown University, OHSS '17): I grew up in El Paso, Texas along the border with our sister city, Juarez, Mexico. I have a BA in Ethnic Studies and am currently a 4th year MD/MPH student doing a year of fellowship with the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs at Warren Alpert Medical School. Currently, I am collecting the oral narratives of transgender, gender nonconforming, and non-binary people in the US and their experiences and understandings of what it means to be healthy. The goal of the project is to make these narratives accessible to health care providers as they learn how to improve health care for these communities. I live in Rhode Island with my wife (a UU minister in training) and our cat, Taj.
Sabine Frid-Bernards (OHSS Program Coordinator, 2018 - 2022) is originally from Portland, Oregon and lived in New York City for ten years before moving to New Orleans during the pandemic. She attended Oral History Summer School for the first time in 2014, and was the Program Coordinator for OHSS from 2018 through 2021; she now works to support small farmers in the South and Southeast with grants and technical assistance. In other lives, she has spent time as a nanny, a cook, a grassroots grant-maker, and a member of a radical childcare collective. She is a weird aunt, amateur welder, salad enthusiast, and biker.
Sady Sullivan (OHSS Intensive 2012, 2014, 2015, Building an Oral History Archive, 2013) is Curator for the Columbia Center for Oral History Archives at Columbia University where she cares for the oldest oral history collection in the United States. From 2006 - 2014, Sady was Director of Oral History at Brooklyn Historical Society, where she led nine oral history projects and managed the preservation of the legacy oral history collections. At Brooklyn Historical Society, Sady created Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations, an award-winning oral history project, racial justice dialogue series, and digital humanities site exploring mixed heritage identity. Her work is influenced by the Buddhist practice of deep listening, and formative experiences at three feminist institutions: The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies, Babeland, and Wellesley Centers for Women. Sady is interested in creating "public homeplaces" and using archives as a hub for community engagement.
Sarah Kramer (OHSS Intensive 2012, Project Lab 2014) is a documentary storyteller and journalist. She was recently a fellow at Sundance New Frontiers Storytelling Lab and currently heads up content at a soon-to-launch storytelling start-up. Prior, Kramer worked at The New York Times for six years where she was a reporter and multimedia editor, creating series such as Emmy-award winning One in 8 Million and Emmy nominated Coming Out. Her credits also include senior producer and founding staffer for Peabody Award-winning StoryCorps where she created the signature sound, provided editorial oversight on the weekly NPR broadcasts and the New York Times bestseller, Listening is an Act of Love. Her radio stories have aired on All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Marketplace; her writing in The New York Times and digital storytelling on NYTimes.com. She launched her career in documentary films for PBS and HBO and is completing a documentary short on her father. Kramer is an adjunct professor at CUNY Journalism School where she teaches the Art of the Interview. You can follow her @sarahk11.
Sara Kendall (OHSS Intensive Assistant 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) I'm interested in how cities change over time, and how people can participate in shaping their own neighborhoods, making their own media, and telling their own stories. I'm interested in how our communities can be our classrooms, and how we can organize powerful movements for justice in the places we live. I work as a Co-Director of Kite's Nest, an alternative learning center for children and teenagers in Hudson, NY, where I've also taught classes on cardboard urban planning, radio journalism, and the geographies of stuff. I'm also currently pursuing an M.A. in geography, based at the Centre for Oral History & Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal; for my research, I'll be working with the Hudson Oral History Archive. Previously, I worked as the founding station manager of WGXC: Hands-on Radio, a community radio station and participatory media project in Hudson. And in July 2012, I helped Suzanne Snider to launch the Oral History Summer School, which introduced me to a transformative language and framework for doing qualitative research and documentary work, and for listening to the world around me.
Sarita Daftary (OHSS Intensive 2016, guest instructor) is an organizer with over fifteen years of experience supporting people and communities to exercise self-determination. Her experience includes previous roles as a Senior Community Organizer with JLUSA, as the director of the Green Light District at El Puente in Williamsburg, and the East New York Farms! (ENYF) Project Director at United Community Centers. As a co-director of Freedom Agenda, Sarita has been among a group of core partners working on the Rikers Public Memory Project, along with CreateFordward and the Humanities Action Lab.
Sara Sinclair is an oral historian of Cree-Ojibwa, German-Jewish and British descent. Sara teaches in the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University. She is Project Director of the Aryeh Neier Oral History Project at Columbia Center for Oral History Research [CCOHR]. Sara is currently co-editing two anthologies of Indigenous letters, for Penguin/Random House Canada. She is the editor of How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America (2020, Voice of Witness/Haymarket Books). She has contributed to CCOHR’s Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive, Obama Presidency Oral History, and Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project. With Peter Bearman and Mary Marshall Clark, Sinclair edited Robert Rauschenberg: An Oral History, published by Columbia University Press in spring 2019. Prior to attending Columbia University's Oral History Masters or Arts, Sara lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she conducted an oral history project for the International Labour Organization’s Regional Office for Africa. Sara’s current and previous clients include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the City of New York, New York City Department of Environmental Protection.
Sarah Geis (she/her) is a long-time editor, producer and educator who is influenced by oral history, documentary theater, and Lynda Barry. She likes experimenting with form, fighting for moments of poetry, and sneaking jokes into serious places. At the Invisible Institute she was the story editor of the podcast “Somebody,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and a producer/story editor of "You Didn't See Nothin." She runs the project Audio Playground, a home for high-risk/low-stakes audio experiments, was the artistic director of Third Coast, and teaches at University of Chicago, Northwestern, and community organizations across the globe. She got her start in audio storytelling with the StoryCorps oral history project.
Sheri Bauer-Mayorga (Collecting and Composing 2015) studied piano, with a focus on contemporary American music and accompanying, at the Hartt School of Music and Brooklyn Conservatory, where she received aBMus. She later completed certificate courses in vocal studies, choral work, and folk song research studying the Kodály Method at Westminster Choir College, the Hartt School of Music, and Somatic Voiceworks at Shenandoah University, and song leading with composer-arranger, Alice Parker. Sheri is founder and director of a singing school for singers ages 8-18, “The Good Globe Singing School,” and also leads local community sings as part of the singing school’s mission to invigorate the life of community song. She has recorded and arranged two eclectic vocal projects for Town Hall Records with a focus on the history of American song from ballads to protest songs to be-bop and performs with the jazz trio, “The Berkshire Bop Society,” in a historical presentation of that repertoire. Sheri also currently teaches chorus, music history, and music electives at the Berkshire Waldorf High School and has a Monday afternoon classical & jazz radio show on Greene and Columbia Counties community radio station, WGXC 90.7FM.
Todd Shalom (Experimental Ethnographies 2018, Project Lab 2014) works in visual media and participatory performance. He is the founder and director of Elastic City, a non-profit organization that produced over 200 participatory walks and events for the public between 2010 and 2016. In that time, he collaborated with over a hundred artists in a variety of disciplines to adapt their sensibilities to the participatory walk format, in addition to developing and leading numerous walks of his own. In collaboration with performance artist/director Niegel Smith, Todd regularly conceives and stages interactive performances in public and private environments. Together, they are ringleaders of Willing Participant, which whips up urgent poetic responses to crazy shit that happens. Todd is a member of the core faculty in Pratt Institute's MFA in Writing. His work has been presented by organizations such as Abrons Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Columbia University GSAPP, The Invisible Dog, ISSUE Project Room, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, P.S. 122 and Stanford University. He has been an artist-in-residence at Akiyoshidai International Art Village (Japan), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, as well as other institutions.
Walis Johnson is a multidisciplinary artist/researcher whose work documents the experience and poetics of the urban landscape through oral history and visual ethnography, performance and artist walking practices. She is particularly interested in the intersection of documentary film, performance and socially engaged practice. Her work explores hidden fissures of culture and history that upend our understanding of the political, economic and cultural structures we use to define the American condition and ourselves. Her practice takes a critical view of the relationship between the personal and political in everyday life. Walis holds an MFA from Hunter College Interactive Media Arts and has taught at Parsons School of Design.
A photographer and a two-time participant in OHSS, Walter Hergt (OHSS Documentation) explores the interplay of long-format audio narrative, photography, and video. Originally from Northern Michigan, Walter has been perpetually leaving small towns for big ones, only to return again. Along the way, he received a Masters degree in Political Science from CUNY Graduate Center, founded a cooperatively-run book store/infoshop in Vermont, acted as director of the Institute for Social Ecology’s Sustainable Design, Building and Land-use program, and worked for sixteen years as a custom builder and energy-efficiency renovator in Vermont and New York. Walter has a breadth of experience on issues ranging from disaster relief and housing rights organizing to independent media production. He now works with The Watershed Center, a retreat and educational center for social justice organizations, and lives with his partner in Millerton, NY. You can see his current project, a multimedia documentary of Chaseholm Farm, on his website at www.walterhergt.com.
zavé martohardjono (b. 1984 in Montréal, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist working in dance, film, installation, and writing. A queer, trans, and Indonesian-American artist, zavé makes works that dwell in their ancestors’ mythologies, contend with embodied political histories, and dream towards more just futures. As an artist, zavé employs reparative modalities from anti-colonial political education to dance/ritual modes to de-condition the body, reconjure liberatory memory, and untangle assimilation. They were most recently published in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Bessie-nominated for Outstanding Performer in 2022, they have presented their interdisciplinary performance works globally including at 92Y, Bemis Center, The Kennedy Center, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Mala Stanica Multimedia Center in Skopje, Storm King, Bronx Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Gibney, HERE Arts, and Issue Project Room. Their work has been written about in the New York Times, BOMB Magazine, CultureBot and Hyperallergic. zavemartohardjono.com | @zavozavito on Instagram