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.
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.
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.
Ambar Johnson (2022)
Ambar Johnson (she/hers) is an urban and transportation planner, media producer, and creative composer with oscillating origins along the east coast.
Her philosophy that time travel and transportation are one of the same orients her thinking and approaches to people, projects, and perspectives. She comes to OHMA to layer and weave urban planning, oral history, and nature to move people — sonically, physically, emotionally, and temporally.
Ambar’s project involves documenting her favorite past time: road trips (regardless of mode) as a vehicle for storytelling. She plans to tell an oral history of I-95 as a timeline and roadmap about what this place means (or place/meant coined by Amiri Bakara) to flora, fauna, and families (including her owns) across generations and geographies I-95 spans. By bridging (oral) history and transportation she hopes to do three things:
1) delicately unravel something that impacts us all — how we get around
2) to restore continuity in families histories and
3) ensure processes and plans in the planning realm are rooted in rich, regenerative practices and histories.
In a world that rushes to move quickly across time, space, and schedules, Ambar aims to use her time in OHMA to travel slowly and listen closely to the people and environments around her.
She received a B.S. in History, Technology, and Society from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. https://www.ambarjohnson.com/
Yu Cui (2022)
Yu Cui, TV news anchor, journalist, PR consultant, and now, oral historian; variety made his day.
Made in Dalian, designed in Beijing, he was raised in a household where a pair of wise businesspeople cultivated him to be both ambitious and generous. He fights to make this world a better place.
He reads, films, paints, writes. Last month, one post of his on Weibo has 650 thousand views.
Ask him to “carpe diem” together, lifestyle is Yu’s field of expertise. He became the youngest team leader in Ruder Finn Communication Group (Beijing) when 23 years old, offering strategic consulting to global brands, including TISSOT, IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN, MONTBLANC, TENCENT, BENTLEY, New World China, and Sino-Ocean Group. Since always, he lives, instead of making a living.
Gym rat, advanced open water diver, Krav Maga learner; jogger, hiker, climber, home cook & foodie. Yu enjoys athletic activities and healthy cuisine.
He acquires much motivation from problem solving, he likes to be challenged, and win. So, he came to Columbia University.
He sees this world as his oyster, exploring it physically and mentally. He loves travelling, while listening to stories, myths, and legends, like an Ancient Greek bard does. His voice is the epic of his odyssey, and he speaks for the voiceless.
Humanity is the theme of Yu’s lifelong pursuit of studies. He will approach and interpret this complexed society through his independent perspective. As an oral historian, he is going to empower the powerless and uplift the downtrodden.
Yu also is known as Killian, find him via:
YouTube/Bilibili/Weibo/WeChatOfficial/RED @ByKliian
Instagram/Facebook @Killian.tsui
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:
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);
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.
Lindsay Szper (2022)
Lindsay Szper is a linguist and a language teacher. She’s fluent in English, Spanish and French, conversational in American Sign Language, and a beginner in several other languages. She has a BA in Spanish, French and Cross-Cultural Studies, a national certification in English/Spanish healthcare interpreting, and a Certificate in Teaching English. Her professional experience is in language teaching, conflict mediation, translation/interpreting, legal case investigation, and interview-based research and writing,
In July, 2021 Lindsay co-founded Culture Without Borders Language Collective, a community school that teaches world languages through friendship. She's currently developing a conversation-focused language-learning program based on materials co-produced for her OHMA thesis. Learn what we're up to at CWB (and join our language-learning community!) at CWBcollective.com
Yuying Wu (2022)
Hailing from Shenzhen, China, Yuying Wu is a dynamic multimedia content creator and storyteller, bringing a rich background to her narrative pursuits. Yuying holds dual Bachelor's degrees in Communications and Economics from UCLA, where her passion for storytelling took shape. Immersed in video storytelling during her UCLA years, she contributed to the school newspaper Daily Bruin and participated in community-based documentary projects, addressing issues like homelessness in Westwood and the roles of women in college sports teams. Her professional journey includes impactful internships at tech giants Tencent and OPPO, shaping her skills in digital marketing and social media operations. Proficient in crafting content strategies for social media platforms, Yuying aims to bridge the realms of multimedia content creation and oral history. Throughout her pursuit of a master's at Columbia University, she aspires to leverage this intersection to communicate impactful stories on a broader scale, exploring the dynamic interplay between personal narratives and broader social science disciplines. As an oral history fellow, she has worked for the Institute for Diversity and Civic Life to curate oral history series on social media, enhancing public engagement of the organization in the Texas community. For her thesis, Yuying engages in art-based research, using it to study the pandemic era and curate a website (https://yuyingwu.cargo.site/) that preserves the oral history and artwork explored in her work. Driven by an unwavering enthusiasm for storytelling, Yuying endeavors to contribute meaningful insights to the realms of history and society through the potent fusion of multimedia content and oral history.
Chunming Zheng (2022)
Chunming Zheng (She/Her/Hers) is an oral historian and interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Beijing, China.
Throughout her OHMA journey, Chunming experimented combining oral history with various art mediums, including VR, exhibition, documentary, nonfiction writing, poetry, and dance. She was a student-artist-in-residency at Movement Lab, Barnard College, where her exhibition Eye to ‘I’: An Oral History In Virtual Reality first launched.
Before joining OHMA, she was the Oral History and Archive Fellow at NYU Shanghai, interviewing and documenting the origins of the first Sino-US university’s establishment, contributing to the documentary "Beginning of Legacy: NYU Shanghai Oral History."
Outside of work, Chunming loves performing, meditating, and exploring the world with her body and mind.
Solby Lim (2022)
Solby Lim 임솔비 is a Korean/American storyteller and researcher currently based out of New York, NY. Solby graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College with a degree in History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, where she completed a thesis on internationalism as forms of political and cultural intimacies for northern Korea (DPRK) during the 1960s. Her thesis drew upon various archives of political cartoons, expressions of art, and literature found in DPRK and US-based print publications, including the Black Panther Party's community newspaper and radical Asian American magazine Gidra, that were published at the time. Solby worked as a student editor and intern for the Barnard's Communications department, pitching and writing profile stories and campus news starting her sophomore year. She previously interned for W. W. Norton & Co. and GLAAD's Media Institute where she wrote for the organization's blog and gathered research for GLAAD's annual Media Reference guide and for the 2020 and 2022 Olympic Games.
Some of her interests lie in radical imaginings of archives, Asian/American history, internationalist art and culture, Korean protest and reunification art, histories of beauty, and multimedia expression as storytelling.
Solby's passion for exploring transnational cultural histories is grounded in her experiences as a third culture kid, having been a Korean raised in Massachusetts, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and Shanghai as a teenager. She finds kinship as an Asian/American and part of the Korean diaspora, both communities she hopes to honor through her studies and work. Solby continues to explore Asian diasporic politics and culture as well as forge new possibilities for archiving Asian/American and other marginalized histories in her work.
Natalie Naranjo-Morett (2022)
Natalie Naranjo-Morett (she/her/ella) was born and raised in San Diego, California where she completed her Bachelor’s degree in history with an emphasis on Latin America at UC San Diego. She also has a double minor in anthropological-archaeology and psychology. Her parents immigrated from Tijuana, Mexico when Natalie was two years old, but her family continues to cross the border often to visit their extended family. Natalie grew up traveling throughout Mexico to vacation with her family and discovered a passion for history and learning about her culture from the local communities.
During her time in OHMA, Natalie was able to grow her skills in exhibit curation and discovered various ways she could provide a platform for Latin American native communities, specifically through collaboration. In past years, Natalie has interned at the San Diego Museum of Man, now known as the Museum of Us, where she was inspired to support Indigenous people in acknowledging and rewriting their history to better represent their culture and their community.
Ariel Urim Chung (2022)
Photo by Jayon Park at “You are (not) Invited”
Ariel Urim Chung (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, technology, and oral history with an aesthetic constructed through trauma studies, embodied research, and her identity as a Korean woman in diaspora. Currently she is a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute and MAGIC Grantee at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
In her academic and artistic endeavors, Ariel aspires to strengthen solidarity within marginalized communities by creating safe spaces for difficult dialogues. In her previous research, she has focused on the relationship between performance and trauma culture to create a more conscious environment for trauma-sufferers and artists.
Currently, Ariel is experimenting, merging her academic directions and artistic mediums to create something foreign to herself. Specifically, she is exploring hyper-imaginative sites for Asian and Asian-American children and parents to engage in conversation through oral history on food. She is a little scared. and excited.
Prior to OHMA, Ariel obtained her B.A. in Theatre with Honors and minor in Computer Science at Davidson College. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, learning new recipes, and dancing!