Instructors: Suzanne Snider
Location: Solaris, 360 Warren Street, Hudson, New York
Tuition: $850 + $25 materials fee

In this writing and oral history workshop, students experiment with a range of literary forms that use oral history as both source material and text. Monologues, oral narratives, documentary theater, and oral tone poetry are among the traditions already defined at the intersection of writing and oral history. We'll explore these known traditions (and/or invent our own) dividing our days between discussions, writing exercises, screenings, select readings and optional workshop time.

Oral history excels at complicating the narrative. How can writers preserve and deliver the same complexity? How can we....Read More»»

Instructors: Suzanne Snider with guest instructor Todd Shalom
Location: Solaris, 360 Warren Street, Hudson, New York
Tuition: $1375 + $25 materials fee

Come all ye budding oral historians, artists, advocates, and researchers who wish to make of use of oral history in your practices. This immersive summer workshop is a rigorous introduction to the field of Oral History. Over the course of twelve days, we’ll cover interview techniques, project design, recording tutorials, and ethics, along with special topics related to the field. This is a great opportunity to jump-start a project in a supportive environment, or to get this training under your belt for future projects with the benefit of deadlines and critique. Participants will be conducting interviews throughout the week. No experience necessary. This year's workshop will include special sessions on .......Read More

Oral History Intensive Workshop with Suzanne Snider
Location: University of Chicago, Art History Department
Instructor: Suzanne Snider
This workshop is closed to registration

The interview is an increasingly common mode of art historical research. Conversations with artists, studio assistants, curators, conservators, and technical or materials experts are a crucial complement to textual and object-based research, particularly when investigating recent histories and marginalized practices. Whether we publish these interviews as standalone texts or as evidence in our dissertations, books, and articles, we are contributing to a new historical record. The prevalence of this practice stands in stark contrast to the absence of practical training and best practices for conducting oral history interviews, as well as a lack of conceptual inquiry into the interview as a form.

As part of the Art History department’s student-run series Speaking of Art: Artist Interviews in Scholarship and Practice, Suzanne Snider, founder/director of Oral History Summer School, will be leading an Oral History Intensive Workshop in April 2019…..Read More, here

Instructors: Suzanne Snider
Location: Verso Books Loft 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, New York
Tuition: Sliding Scale, $350 - $525. Registration opens January 28

This hands-on workshop––open to all––is based on our popular 10-day intensive, covering oral history theory, method and practice. Over the course of the weekend, we'll address interview techniques, recording tutorials, ethics, memory, annotation and experimental outcomes. Come all ye documentarians, journalists, artists, media-makers, educators and those looking to learn new things in good company! No experience necessary. Read more about the workshop and sliding scale structure, here….

This workshop is designed for educators who want to bring oral history into their classrooms or learning spaces. We’ll begin with a rigorous introduction to oral history theory, methods and practice before reviewing existing curricula as a jumping off place to design our own.

We’ll think about how oral history’s best practices dovetail with our learning objectives, seizing upon the field’s potential to support active listening, ethical documentary practice along with considerations of: primary sources, myth, memory, the archive as a future history, silence, talking across difference, problem solving, shared authority, collaborative analysis and historiography…..Read More

*photo by Walter Hergt