Kristen La Follette employs playwriting to reimagine interviews on stage. Her verbatim play, Pushing Against the Water: A Bay Area Muslim Women’s Oral History Project was featured in the 2019 Greenhouse Theatre Festival in San Francisco. A Glimpse Through the Curtain: Monologues of American Catholic Sisters was read in New York City and Pennsylvania. Kristen researches and writes about oral history theatre. She taught workshops for organizations, including the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and Veteran’s Oral History Project. Kristen graduated in 2012 with an M.A. in Oral History. She worked at Columbia Center for Oral History, serves on the Columbia Oral History Alumni Association Board and is a founding member of the Oral History Association’s Emerging Professionals Committee. In 2019, she earned her M.F.A. in Playwriting from San Francisco State University. She teaches creative writing and oral history at California State University Monterey Bay.

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.