FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
April 14, 2024
Contact: Judith Monachina
Director, Housatonic Heritage Oral History Center at Berkshire Community College
413-236-1025
judithmonachina@berkshirecc.edu
Oral History Center symposium leaders announced
Experts on project design, interviewing, digital storytelling, bilingual projects, oral history theater, and other subjects will share their expertise
STOCKBRIDGE, Mass.—The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge will be the site of a day-long Oral History Symposium, to be held on May 9, 2024. The Housatonic Heritage Oral History Center at Berkshire Community College is planning the event. The deadline for registration is April 27.
Symposium session leaders include:
Sady Sullivan is an educator and oral historian with more than 15 years of experience building community oral history projects. Sady created Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations, an award-winning oral history project, racial justice dialogue series, and digital humanities site exploring mixed-heritage identity in Brooklyn, NY. She has partnered with organizations, communities, and individuals throughout the Northeast to create diverse multimedia resources, including digital archives, audio walking tours, curriculum kits, museum exhibitions, books, and digital publications. Her oral history interviews are used as primary sources in K-12 curricula, walking tours, podcasts, and public history exhibitions at institutions such as Brooklyn Historical Society, New-York Historical Society, El Museo del Barrio, and Brooklyn Navy Yard BLDG92. Sady’s latest project documents ways in which people with European ancestry are working to unravel Whiteness and help end white supremacy.
Ann Gallo directs UBU Theater and previously, in New York, Milan, Italy, and Massachusetts, she was an active proponent of the arts and a hands-on participant in youth programs. Recently, Ann co-wrote and directed Women of Tyringham, verbatim theater, using her interviews from 32 women who have lived in Tyringham. She is now working on an offshoot project in the Bronx. To prepare for the required script writing using transcripts, she participated in an intensive program at the British Museum.
Ann obtained a master’s degree in Theater Education at Emerson College. Her thesis, “Using Youth Development Theory as the Foundation for a Regional Theater Teen Council,” had a profound impact on her professional goals. By applying her experience as a mother, her passion for theater, and years of community service, Ann is now focused on working with youth-centered organizations that want to participate in changing how society perceives and engages with teenagers. Her goal is to support urban and rural youth-development/empowerment organizations in the Berkshires by finding a position or role that uses her ability to connect and communicate effectively with disenfranchised youth. She has worked with several Berkshire based theater programs.
Fernanda Espinosa is an oral historian and cultural practitioner. Since 2014 she has been generating, listening to, and interpreting oral histories in English and Spanish to inform creative activations that aspire to act as platforms for resistance and dialogue. Fernanda holds an MA degree in Oral History from Columbia University, where she received the 2018 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award for her work with the Ecuadorian diaspora in New York. She collaborates with Circular at the intersections of language justice, research, and oral history, and works as an independent oral historian with museums, archives, and universities. Fernanda was recently a National Endowment for the Humanities’ Oral History Association Fellow where she developed her project with Latinx artists titled In Colors.
Jake Sadow, Statewide Digitization Project Archivist at Boston Public Library, will talk about what it takes to get our oral history interviews and projects into the Digital Commonwealth statewide archive, where they can be viewed online and archived safely. Jake has worked on many projects, including the Tyringham Historical Society’s collection, working with the Oral History Center and Ann Gallo. An oral history project without a relationship with an archive may disappear, putting at risk the hard work of the project leaders and the time and hope of the interviewees.
The Housatonic Heritage Oral History at Berkshire Community College has been working with regional organizations since 2016, when the Center was formed as a collaboration between Housatonic Heritage and Berkshire Community College.
Deadline for registering for the symposium is April 27, 2024. A registration fee of $30 includes lunch, coffee/tea, and all presentations and workshops. For information, call or send an email: 413-236-1025, or Jmonachina@berkshirecc.edu.
To register: https://buytickets.at/upperhousatonicvalleynationalheritagearea/1209580
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