Reem Aboukhater (2012)

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Reem Aboukhater just moved to New York City from Boston - her favorite city in the world! She attended Boston College where she pursued her love for literature. When Reem is not conducting OHMA interviews she’s working at Stick Figure Productions helping to make documentary films. Reem originally comes from the Middle East; she grew up in England and France, and now she describes herself as a citizen of the world.

Maggie Argiro (2013)

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Maggie Argiro, originally from Columbus, Ohio, joins OHMA from Ohio Wesleyan University where she received a BA in Sociology/Anthropology. She has in interest in writing and wishes to find ways to bridge the humanities and the social sciences with oral history. In 2012 Maggie received a “Theory-to-Practice” grant through Ohio Wesleyan University to travel to Cuba and learn about the history and people of Santería. While there she conducted interviews and returned with a photographic exhibition that incorporated the collected oral histories.  She has also interned with the Somali Documentary Project, a non-profit organization formerly located in Columbus, Ohio. She assisted with grantwriting and research, and became involved with the Somali community. She intends on returning to collect life histories from Somalis who live in Columbus. Her research interests include the movements of people, transnationalism, and ideas about home and place, all of this with an eye toward revealing social inequalities and giving voice to those who are regularly overlooked. She is particularly interested in literary uses of oral histories, and in debates about what is considered to be nonfiction or fiction. She is currently the oral history intern at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.

Laura Barnett (2013)

In 2013, I arrived at Columbia with a career in theater, performance art, film, and education. Having received my undergraduate degree in 1988 (AB Brown University; English – Creative Writing), being back in the classroom was a thrill. The professors, my cohort, classes within and outside of OHMA: extraordinary! Since receiving my MA, I have incorporated oral history into my teaching and artistic practices.  

Projects include: editing the commemorative book Saint Ann’s School; An Unofficial History – 1965-2015; oral history interview training for choreographer Meredith Monk’s House Foundation; oral history interview training for The Actor’s Fund/Performing Arts Legacy Project; leading a workshop on oral history and the virtual theater classroom for NY Academy of Teachers; and the site-specific performance piece We Can Find The Words, commissioned by the Brooklyn Public Library in March 2021 to recognize the one-year anniversary of NYC’s lockdown. As an Advisory Board Member of Equality Now’s Adolescent Girls’ Legal Defense Fund, I have directed several documentary theater pieces that advance the organization’s mission. 

My earlier work in experimental theater includes directing/producing at 59E59 Street, Judson Church, and chashama Experimental Theatre, where I curated Windows on 42nd Street, a six-month series of installations and performances for storefront windows in a transitioning Times Square. Performance pieces Inside/Out, Secret Confession Box, and Spinning were presented in NYC and Berlin. In the 90s, I toured with Love Theatre, performing at venues including London’s ICA, Budapest’s Katona József Színház and festivals in Belgium, Holland, and the former Yugoslavia. I also worked extensively with independent filmmaker, Amir Naderi, casting films presented in competition in festivals including Cannes and Venice. Earlier work in media includes casting/producing commercial photography. In a fifteen year career, clients included Swissair, Adidas, Ray Ban, Canon, Uniqlo, Volvo, Esquire, and IBM. 

A throughline in my life has been teaching teenagers. At Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, I have directed twenty-five productions and teach Acting and Performance Art. Additional teaching: Columbia University’s Summer Program for High School Students; PS 234 & PS 89, and guest workshops at Queens College and Parson’s School of Design. I currently live in Brooklyn, my hometown, with my husband and college-age son. 

Carrie Brave Heart (2013)

Carrie Brave Heart joins the OHMA program from South Dakota. She
received her BS in History/Art History from Northern Arizona University
in 2010. She has a great love of Native American History and is excited in the possibilities resulting from the use of Oral History to add to the telling or use in the revision of traditional western historical narrative. In 2010, she began a project pertaining to artwork contained in the David Humphreys Miller Collection. This ongoing project’s purpose has been to locate living descendants of a group of Northern Plains Native American women, who Miller drew individual untitled portraits of, in the 1930’s. Her ultimate goal is to create biographies for each of these women to accompany their portraits, through the use of oral history interviews. Her current thesis work in the OHMA program is the Indian Village at the New York State Fair.

Kate Brenner (2014)

Kate Brenner attended the University of Wisconsin, where she received a BA in Chinese and a certificate in Gender and Women's Studies. There she also developed an interest in folklore, and had her first exposure to oral history, editing interview transcriptions at the Wisconsin Veteran's Museum. During two years of AmeriCorps in Minneapolis, she ran after school classes and became interested in trying to find ways to get students to tell their own stories. When she moved to New York, she began an internship with City Lore, an organization dedicated to promoting New York's living cultural heritage. Kate is especially interested in the intersection of folklore and oral history.

Ellen Brooks (2012)

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Ellen Brooks (she/her/her) is an oral history producer and consultant who currently works with WiLS (Wisconsin Library Systems) on the IMLS grant-funded Accelerating Promising Practices project, mentoring and supporting a cohort of practitioners as they take on oral history initiatives, community digitization events, and other projects to document and share their unique local stories.

Prior to her current role, Ellen worked as the Oral Historian for the State Archives of North Carolina (January 2019 - August 2020) and as the Oral Historian for the Wisconsin Veterans Museum (2013-2018).

Ellen found her way to oral history through a passion for storytelling and public history. She graduated from the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University in 2013. Prior to OHMA, she received BAs in History and Communications from Fordham University and interned at multiple cultural institutions, including the Chicago History Museum, the Chicago Cultural Alliance, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Ellen is a founding member of the OHA Emerging Professionals Committee and holds a seat on the Columbia Oral History Alumni Association Board. She enjoys welcoming new voices into the oral history space - both practitioners and narrators. Ellen’s principle interests include archival practices, podcasting, digital humanities and the intersection of all these with oral history. 

K.O. Campbell (2011)

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K.O. Campbell grew up on Lookout Mountain, TN. She graduated from Pomona College in 2008 with a degree in English Literature. Among other things, she is interested in an intersection in Harlem. 

William Chapman (2013)

William Chapman is a California native and recent graduate of California State University, Fresno, with a B.A. in History. His previous oral history experience has centered around interviewing World War II veterans, and the development of the Central California War Veterans Oral History Project, based at CSU Fresno. Through the course of the OHMA program at Columbia University, William hopes to apply his historical training and love for the interview process to further his goal of one day working for The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

China Ching (2008)

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Bessie Dvora China Leipakumakaniokalani Ching (China Ching) was named according to Hawaiian and Jewish traditions and is honored to carry names from the matrilineal lines of both her parents. She has provided capacity-building assistance to Indigenous communities around the world with a particular focus on using media technologies and storytelling to promote Indigenous rights, support social and community change and to complement cultural documentation. China is currently an Associate Program Officer for the Christensen Fund, a private foundation based in San Francisco. She works on supporting and increasing Indigenous participation and representation in global processes affecting Indigenous rights and biocultural diversity.

China is a proud (and fierce) aunty and godmother and blessed to be the daughter and granddaughter of artists.

Sewon Chung Barrera (2012)

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Sewon Chung Barrera is a digital marketer, content strategist, and oral historian based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sewon currently manages the digital marketing department at the Exploratorium, a San Francisco-based museum of science, art, and human perception described by the New York Times as the most important science museum to have opened since the mid-20th century. She also serves as a Multilingual Language Advocate and communications consultant for Bay Area human rights advocacy groups and community organizations. Previously, Sewon led global content marketing campaigns at Samsung, and developed content strategies for startups and Fortune 500 companies at Brafton.

Sewon received a Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University in 2013. As a graduate student at OHMA, Sewon conducted oral history fieldwork at BLDG 92 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and museum studies field work at the American Museum of Natural History. Her thesis on Central Park North, advised by Dr. Mabel O. Wilson from the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, culminated in an interactive exhibit experience launched digitally and through a pop-up installation in Brooklyn. Sewon also holds a dual B.A. in Literary & Cultural Studies and Sociology from The College of William & Mary.

More at www.sewonchung.com

Sara Cohen-Fournier (2011)

Sara Cohen-Fournier has been working for the last 3 years as an active interviewer, and group coordinator of the community-based project Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by Wars, Genocide and Human Rights Violations. She is really exited to pursue more training and explore the issue of trauma and fear. She hopes in doing so to understand deeper the essence of listening in mental health issues.

Ellen Coon

Ellen Coon comes to the program after seven years collecting narratives of feminine divinity in the Kathmandu Valley.  A former Fulbright scholar, her interests include ritual, ecology, and food.

Allison Corbett (2013)

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Allison Corbett is a Spanish interpreter, oral historian, and documentarian based in New York City. In her work she seeks to be a bridge - across language, culture, and difference. Her goal is to gather and share stories through film, radio, and interactive media, that nourish the development of strong, multilingual communities engaged in the work of self-determination and societal transformation. As an interpreter, she facilitates oral communication between Spanish-speakers and non-Spanish-speaking English-speakers with the goal of creating more inclusive and equality-minded communities.

Prior to coming to OHMA, she spent eight years in working in Latinx communities in the U.S. and Latin America as an interpreter, educator, and in various non-profit roles. During her time at OHMA, she partnered with a project documenting gentrification and displacement in Crown Heights, and conducted her fieldwork in Argentina, building on previous experiences studying the politics of memory in La Plata, Buenos Aires. Her master's thesis and subsequent film short (premiering at the 2015 Oral History Association Annual Meeting) explores the way that spaces of ruin and trauma associated with Argentina's last dictatorship reflect and interact with political memory work on the outskirts of La Plata.

Following her graduation from OHMA, Allison began working as an interpreter at Mt. Sinai, St. Luke's, and Roosevelt Hospitals and has embarked on a number of projects supporting collectives, organizers, and artists in documenting community stories in upper Manhattan. She is an enthusiastic member of the collective-run bookstore Word Up in Washington Heights, and is a founding member of the Oral History Collective, a group of OHMA-trained oral historians interested in nurturing collaborative creative processes as well as sustainable self-employment within the field. She also coordinates the Oral History Exchange, a bi-monthly book/media discussion club, as a Board member of the Columbia Oral History Alumni Association. 

Contact: corbett.allison@gmail.com

Hana Crawford (2012)

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Hana Crawford joins the 2012-2013 OHMA cohort from New Mexico, her home state, where she was interviewing Native artists for the Southwest Association of Indian Arts and the 81st Santa Fe Indian Market. She completed a B.A. at Antioch College in Self, Society, and Culture, where she became acquainted with qualitative research methods. Upward mobility and post-release experiences of ex-felons are among her research interests.  Hana plans to produce a radio piece as part of her thesis project.

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Becky Cross (2010)

Becky Cross came to OHMA from Muskingum University. As an undergraduate Becky's focus was on the gentrification occurring in Columbus, Ohio’s historic district. Here, she explored the re-development of a historically middle-class African American neighborhood transforming into an affluent community of same-sex couples using oral history narratives, and the PBS documentary “Flag Wars.” In 2009, she was Muskingum University’s first Forensic intern and produced a publication in the “Ohio Forensics Manual” entitled: Establishing Legacy through Relationship: Exploring the Coaching Paradigm in Higher Education as “Inspired” Narrative. This work inspired by the University’s decision to “clean house,” which included the disposal of hundreds of Speech and Debate team trophies dating back to the 1960’s.  While studying at Columbia, she used oral history interviews from CUNY’s “Women’s Activist Voices” collection to better understand activist identity of second wave feminists. Her thesis was entitled: Our Foremothers: Constructions of Activist Identity in the Second Wave of Feminism, which attempts to reconcile some of the tensions of contemporary feminist identity constructions by examining the lives of ordinary women from the second wave of feminism. Currently, Becky is living in Cleveland, Ohio and working as the manager of external relations for the region's largest small business support organization. The Council of Smaller Enterprise (COSE), a non-profit organization that provides advocacy on legislative and regulatory issues and educational resources to help Northeast Ohio’s small businesses grow. Recently, she interviewed 13 small business owners from northeast ohio for a video documentary displayed at COSE's 40-year anniversary annual meeting. 

Benji de la Piedra (2014)

Benji de la Piedra grew up in Northern Virginia and Washington, DC. In May 2014, he graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University with a B.A. in American Studies. He has spent the past three years working for Columbia’s Freedom & Citizenship Program, helping coordinate and teach a civic engagement course modeled on the College’s Core Curriculum for first-generation, college-bound high school seniors. Benji wrote his undergraduate thesis on Ralph Ellison's unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting, for which he received departmental honors. Ellison’s writings have provided Benji a useful and evocative language for investigating the civic, educational, and artistic implications of American racial identities. For his OHMA thesis, Benji returned to Three Days, introducing the text and its author to the discourse of oral history ethics and intellectual history by way of the Federal Writers’ Project of the late 1930s. In September, Benji and Mario Alvarez (OHMA '15) will begin gathering the life histories of current Columbia graduate students from all backgrounds. With these interviews, they hope to initiate a restorative campus-wide conversation about the ideals and nuanced realities of diversity, belonging, and inclusion at the university.