Shuai Dang (2025)

My name is Dang Shuai, and I come from Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, China. 

Before joining the Oral History program at Columbia University, I interned at the Cui Yongyuan Oral History Center at the Communication University of China.

Since 2019, I have been involved in oral history interviews with Chinese Radio Broadcasters & the Development of Radio Broadcasting. During this process, I have gained a deep understanding of the importance of the interviewer's listening in oral history and how the interviewer's words, emotions, psychology, and actions affect the interviewee's oral narrative. I want to pursue further research in this area.

In 2020, I participated in an oral history interview with the "Encyclopedia Scholars" organized by the Encyclopedia of China Publishing House. In the process, I felt the love and passion of these scholars for their profession. This has inspired me to take up oral history work so that more people, especially ordinary people, can tell and share their stories.

Next, I will use oral history to study how cultural heritage and mass media influence people's collective memory.

Olivia Hurtado (2025)

Olivia has spent the majority of her life in New Jersey, where she grew up and calls home. Since 2018, she has lived in Michigan, completing her Bachelor’s degree in philosophy and Spanish at the University of Michigan. During her years studying, she worked in the university’s writing center as a writing consultant for her peers. Simultaneously, and perhaps in the tradition of her parents, lifelong hospitality workers, she has also worked in a variety of food service jobs, currently serving and bartending in a fine dining restaurant.

She brings to OHMA an interest in studying the restaurant by way of oral history. Observing and talking to restaurant patrons from behind the bar and working alongside restaurant staff in the front and back of house, she has met people with manifold backgrounds and aspirations with whom she never may have interacted in the classroom. 

She is thrilled to learn about the history and practice of oral history in general and especially as it presents an opportunity to merge what she has learned in and out of the classroom (and create something new from it!)

Kangni Wang (2025)

Born in a faraway rural town in Hunan, raised amidst the vibrant immigrant city of Shenzhen, and educated in Beijing, the political and cultural epicenter of China, I have been spending the past 22 years exploring and redefining my identity. While my unique background has made it for me difficult to fit into predefined categories, it has also cultivated within me the ability to accept and empathize with all types of people, whether they belong to the marginalized or the mainstream. This is a product of my upbringing and education in a variety of socioeconomic and cultural contexts.

Being educated and working as a journalist during college years, I have spoken with and interviewed a wide range of people, from top executives of state-owned companies to young depressed people, cleaning ladies, young and old mechanic workers, and small restaurant operators struggling to make a living in the big city. I enjoy having conversations with and learning from such individuals because of the insight their words provide into the experiences and perspectives that have molded not only them but also the world in which I live.

With a foundation in journalism, I come to OHMA with a zeal to begin the media practice as an oral historian. I aspire to bring the subtleties back to narratives, to reintroduce the nuances that often go unnoticed, and to give voice to the unheard.

Romy David (2025)

Romy David joined OHMA by way of Los Angeles and New York. She completed her undergraduate studies at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, where her passion for politics and media first took root. After graduating and interning at the Obama White House, she became an Associate Producer at MSNBC, focusing on booking guests and amplifying unique voices to spotlight the era’s most important stories. Driven by a desire to delve into longer-form storytelling, Romy transitioned to the documentary space before pursuing her Master’s degree at OHMA. Her thesis examined the lived experiences of two women navigating barriers to abortion access, demonstrating the power of personal narratives to humanize political discourse, evoke empathy, and inspire advocacy for reproductive justice. Romy’s work focuses on sharing first-person narratives that reveal the real-life consequences of political decisions, and she is committed to using storytelling to drive meaningful change.

Maya Gayer (2025)

Maya Gayer is a journalist, content editor, and program director with over two decades of experience in the media field.
Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Maya has spent the past decade as a senior director of programming and content editor at GLZ Radio, a public station with one of the largest audiences in the country. She served as the editor-in-chief of The Broadcast University, one of the station’s flagship programs, which hosted top Israeli scholars for talks on a wide array of topics. Maya created series dedicated to subjects such as democracy, the climate crisis, feminism, religion and state, and immigration. She is also the co-editor of the program's book series.

As senior director of programming at GLZ, she was responsible for the station's Holocaust Remembrance Day broadcasts. Preserving and shaping collective memory in this framework sparked her initial interest in oral history. In recent years, Maya established and directed the Persitz Program in Arts Management at the Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality and was the head content editor of the science documentary series The Future is Already Here, which aired on KAN (Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation). Additionally, she taught radio and podcast production at Sapir Academic College and the University of Haifa.
Maya holds an MA, Magna Cum Laude, and a BFA, Summa Cum Laude, in Film and Television studies from Tel Aviv University. She was awarded the Fulbright Fellowship in Public Humanities to pursue an MA in Columbia University’s Oral History Program. For her thesis project, she created an oral history archive of the Israeli Democracy Protest Movement, the largest grassroots movement in Israeli history, which operated through 2023 in response to the government's attempts to overhaul the judicial system.

Through interviews with more than 20 of its leading organizers, the archive aims to preserve the history of this pivotal moment in Israeli society and contribute to the study of democratic backsliding and civil resistance, offering a critical case study for other societies facing similar challenges. The archive is intended to be preserved in the Israel National Library and the Judaica and Hebraica Collections at Stanford University.

Leigh Pennington (2022)

Hailing from Richmond Virginia, Leigh Pennington is an Op-Ed Editor for the Times of Israel and a freelance arts and culture journalist. She earned her BA in Anthropology, Art History, and Religion from Concordia University in Montreal and her Masters degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jewish Studies. Her writing has been published in major news and opinion media including Tablet Magazine, the Times of Israel, and Up Magazine.

Gloria Mogango Alumbi Ma Ekonzo (2023)

Gloria Victoire is a Congolese-born French scholar and oral historian with a deep passion for exploring cultural identity within the African diaspora. Raised in France, Gloria has always navigated between different worlds—her Congolese heritage and the French culture she grew up in. She earned a dual degree in Art History and Anthropology, and later pursued a Master’s degree in Oral History at Columbia University. Her current project, "Am I My Culture’s Keeper?", delves into the complexities of cultural preservation, belonging, and the transmission of heritage among African diasporic communities. Gloria’s work is deeply influenced by her own experiences of navigating identity, tradition, and self-expression, making her a powerful advocate for the preservation of oral histories and cultural legacies.

Aya Taveras (2022)

Aya is from the Manhattan Valley neighborhood bordering Columbia's campus and brings an intimate awareness of how stories of impacted communities can be obfuscated or viewed through a prism of stereotype.

Aya began her career as a middle school English Language Arts teacher and recently worked as Director of Story and Representation at Perception Institute where she interrogated how implicit bias, identity anxiety, and stereotype threat can emerge in the media landscape. She now works as the Director of Community at Cinereach.

She hopes to learn how to leverage oral history as a means of redistributing power to communities that have often been excluded from storytelling tables.

Clarissa Shane (2023)

Clarissa Shane is an interdisciplinary creative and oral historian from Stockton, CA. She graduated with a BA in Humanities, the Arts, and Social Thought from Bard College Berlin where she did multimedia research in her maternal ancestral land: Paredones, Michoacán, Mexico on human/nonhuman entanglements – how wild plant usage in ceremony, medicine, and cuisine impacts cultural traditions and environmental conservation. Clarissa continued working with these themes as she created a Paredones Plant Oral History repository for her Oral History Master’s thesis. During her time in NYC, she also collected plant knowledge from community Gardeners for the New York Botanical Garden’s Bronx Foodways Oral History Project. In her free time, she studies Ayurvedic herbalism and is committed to Land Justice initiatives. clarissa.shane.edu@gmail.com

Florencia Ruiz Mendoza (2022)

Florencia Ruiz Mendoza is from Mexico City. She has been and advocate against forced disappearance for almost twenty years. She initiated her career documenting state crimes for the Historical Report Qué no Vuelva a Suceder, acknowledged as Patrimony of Memory.

She collaborated for the Historical Memory Project at John Jay College/CUNY, the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Latin American Network at the International Sites of Conscience.
Her literary work has been featured in Los Acentos Review and Restless Immigrants Workshop Blog. She is a reader of color for The Masters Review. She holds a BA in History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and was a Columbia University Human Rights Advocate in 2009 and an OHMA Summer Fellow in 2010.

As an OHMA alumnus and Oral Historian, she lectures in Mexico on Oral History and Human Rights.

Vy Luu (2021)

Vy Luu (she/her) was born in Vietnam and raised in San Diego, California. She is interested in contributing the stories of those who have been at the margins to our understanding of history, particularly the stories of the Vietnamese-American community. Before OHMA, Vy received her B.A. in Sociology with Honors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University. Beyond oral history, she is currently the Senior Manager of Learning and Technology at Murmuration, where she teaches organizations how to use data and technology to amplify their civic engagement efforts.

Auriana Woods (2022)

Auriana Woods (she/her/hers) is a historian in-the-making, an amateur genealogist, a daughter of the Great Migration, and an avid investigator at heart. She first moved to New York in 2019 after graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in Africana Studies, but is originally from Seattle, WA by way of Detroit, MI and Mayfield, KY.

Her belief that silence and truth are one and the same is likely thanks to her father, who taught her the invaluable skills of inference, persistence, and improvisation at an early age. She is driven by a fundamental urge to get to the bottom of things, which comes down to an intense (and often stubborn) passion for authenticity, intimacy, and real meaning.

Auriana works and creates with the knowledge that, in the words of Miss Ida B. Wells, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them,” and with a firm conviction that unearthing, gathering, and preserving Black personal narratives is one of the most powerful tools to do justice by our collective past, present, and future lineage.

Her thesis will build off of a personal genealogy project that is five years in the making: a search for a family history lost in the aftermath of leaving Kentucky during the Great Migration in 1953 and her grandmother’s unexpected death in 1968. Her primary ~personal~ goal in doing so is (and always has been) to know herself, her history, and those with whom she belongs. 

Her project also lives at the intersection of her two most central academic (and still personal) research interests:

1. The consequences of having a popular national history that fails to position slavery and its ongoing legacy as the bedrock from which her country was (and is) built (“Past is present is passed on.” –Tiya Miles, All That She Carried);

2. The oscillating effects of the Great Migration on Black American identity formation, with a particular emphasis on the relationship to nationhood, sense of place, and belonging.

Auriana is very excited to be a part of a program that allows her to combine her love for Black American history, investigative research, knowledge production, storytelling, and archival genealogy in one place, and importantly, to be doing work that engages in the recovery of humanity across the diaspora –– what she considers to be central to her duty as a historian.

Chris Pandza (2021)

Chris Pandza graduated from OHMA in 2023, where his studies focused on using artificial intelligence to organize, analyze, and generate oral histories. Chris is interested in experimenting with tools to make large oral history corpora more accessible to end-users, including researchers and the general public.

Chris currently works in design at Incite, where he touches on projects including the Obama Presidency Oral History, I See My Light Shining, Logic(s) magazine, Assembling Voices, and MyVote Project. Prior to joining Incite, Chris held various roles in tech, media, and telecom, including managing marketing for Disney Channel, Cartoon Network, and TELUS Communications. Chris also helped produce the podcast Hazard NJ, which won the New Jersey Journalism Impact Award in 2022.

Chris holds a BA in Media and an HBA in Business Administration from Western University, Canada, and an MA in Oral History from Columbia University.

Sach Takayasu (2019)

In her oral history projects, Sach Takayasu creates paintings together with the narrator, an innovative process from which key memories and stories come to life. The collaboration produces interviews and images that convey multisensory memories of what the narrator experienced, felt, saw, and tasted. The resulting pieces enable the audience to connect with the stories, even if they are not familiar with the narrator's culture, language, or historic experience. 

A quick view of this approach could be seen on her OHMA exhibit page, which also features an audio story about a time and tradition that no longer exists: a marriage arranged in 1928 Japan and how that fared as the couple's world turned upside down. 

Prior to developing this approach, Sach interviewed the Asian American activist, Suki Terada Ports, who illuminated the cultural complexity of fighting HIV/AIDS. 

Sach holds a Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University. At INCITE/Columbia Center for Oral History Research, she served as a Fellow and interviewer for its Obama Presidency Oral History Project. She also led the Weatherhead East Asian Institute’s oral history project. 

As a member of the Oral History Association, she serves on its Diversity Committee and has presented in its annual meetings. 

She also serves on her alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University's Board of Advisors for the Dean of Dietrich College.

Margie Cook (2020)

Born and raised in Northern California, Margie Cook moved to New York City in January of 2009. Woefully unprepared for her first winter in the City, she eventually found her groove (and a proper winter wardrobe). She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Literary Studies from The New School.

Her Peruvian ancestry inspired her love for language and history. Her maternal grandfather’s mother tongue was Quechua; her mother’s Spanish; and her's, English. She was inspired to apply to Columbia's OHMA program after an internship at the Peruvian magazine Etiequeta Negra. While working on an issue about climate change, she dove deeper into the histories of indigenous communities leading the charge against polluting corporations. She contributed an article that included an exploration of her own family’s involvement in an environmental protest that sparked a small movement among neighboring towns. She wants to tell the story of endangered languages to ultimately revitalize and preserve them while shedding light on the social and environmental injustices faced by minority and endangered language speakers that she uncovered through her research.

Margie currently works for the Arts and Culture arm of the Brooklyn Public Library where she has led and supported programs aimed at promoting cultural inclusivity through the free exchange of knowledge. The most recent project she's organized, University Open Air, invites immigrant academics back into the classroom to lecture on a range of topics. She is grateful to find herself in this privileged role of helping redefine and expand on the democratic ideals in one of New York City’s most democratic institutions.

Sun Oh (2008)

Sun Oh graduated from the OHMA program in 2010, where she focused her academic research on "narrative crisis" among people with mental illness who struggle with losing and re-taking agency and the "authorship" of their own life stories. After living and working in New York City, she now lives in London.

Anahí Naranjo (2019)

Anahí is an environmental justice advocate and storyteller from Quito, Ecuador. Uprooted from her agrarian livelihood in Ecuador to Bushwick, New York in 2002, she began to see the social and environmental inequalities her communities faced. She attended Middlebury College where she conducted life story ethnographic research that focused on the story of self and environment to gather individual and community histories to advocate for climate justice.

In 2016, Anahí conducted a photography and oral history project in Tanzania titled “Sagara Stories: Agrarian Narratives of Resilience of the Women of the West Usambara Mountains” to highlight the power that an agrarian narrative can have in revealing details of the resiliency of a culture in a changing climate and world. Anahí was a Doris Duke Conservation Scholar at the University of Washington from 2015-2016. There, she conducted another life story project where she photographed and interviewed tribal members of the Quinault Indian Nation on their life histories and their connections to the natural world to combat a proposed oil terminal that would endanger traditional treaty grounds. Anahí graduated in 2017 with a B.A. in Environmental Studies with a concentration in History.

Never forgetting her roots, Anahí's OHMA thesis explored the impacts of climate change on the cultural and physical landscape on her Andean hometown of Guaranda, Ecuador through her grandparents' stories. She continues her oral history journey through a platform she created called Inclusive Conservation (https://www.inclusiveconservation.org/) of how narratives can empower communities to become agents of change towards climate and social justice.

Today, Anahí is the NYC Program Coordinator for Latino Outdoors and the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform Coordinator at the Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy (CEED).

Zack Daniel Schiavetta (2019)

A pop musician and lifelong history student, Zack Daniel Schiavetta is part of the 2019/2020 OHMA cohort. A 2019 Graduate from the State University of New York at Purchase College, he’s a musician who has been performing and releasing his own records since 2014, but has held history very close to his heart.

Zack views and studies history as a way to understand power and how it is obtained, destroyed, manipulated, and perceived. His senior thesis was “A Brief History of New York City Anarchism: 1901-2011”, documenting the story of a movement that sought to destroy government power, and attempt to claim the city as their own from the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, to the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. He was first introduced to this topic as a touring musician, organizing shows, and releasing records, within the D.I.Y music scene of New York City and the northeastern United States. He saw the “Circle A” symbol marked in the D.I.Y spaces he’d play and book, as well as fellow musicians and friends identifying themselves as anarchists. He was intrigued by the political philosophy that his friends held onto and wanted to research more about this history.

During his time at OHMA, he wishes to expand upon this further, by researching and conducting interviews of New York City’s anarchists. He hopes to finalize his findings and research by publishing it as a book.