This micro-credential will be limited to 8 graduate students. The application will be due by Wednesday September 7th:

Four required meetings are:

Zoom Class 1 - Oct 18; 3:30-5:00 pm

Zoom Class 2 - Oct 25; 3:30-5:00 pm

Zoom Class 3 - Nov 1; 3:30-5:00 pm

Zoom Class 4 - Nov 8; 3:30-5:00 pm

This micro-credential course is an adaptation of a semester-long course developed and taught by Liza Zapol and Nicki Pombier at Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts program. Participants will explore and discuss the possibilities and ethics of oral history as inspiration and provocation for creative and scholarly work. Students will examine and experiment with writing and performance, asking how we can use oral history in our own work. 

This class will be a space for experimentation and serious play, where students will discuss questions raised by the work of others, and grapple with those questions by making their own new work. Pedagogically, we will explore two areas of creation: oral history on the page, and oral history in performance. Class time will be spent discussing texts, workshopping students’ creative projects, and participating in activities designed to deepen students’ sense of possibilities of oral history in their own practice. In addition, participants will plumb their own memories for material, to more deeply understand what it means to ask a narrator to make their “stories” public; in noticing what provokes us and where our own limits may lie, we can better understand the vulnerability in the fundamental ask of oral history: to make public the private domain of memory.    

Liza Zapol is a screenwriter and an oral historian. She writes films and plays on the themes of creativity, memory and place. Liza Zapol was the Robert and Arlene Kogod Secretarial Scholar, Oral Historian at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Liza also worked for the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she created the Whitney Education Community Advisory Network. Liza developed the oral history program for the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. She has also worked with the National Building Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Brooklyn History, Village Preservation, The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Massachusetts General Hospital. 

Zapol has taught at Columbia University and the New School for Drama, and lectures on the intersection of oral history and art. Zapol started her career in performance, creating documentary and ensemble based theater, working with Elevator Repair Service, A Traveling Jewish Theater, and her own clown company, The Combustibles. She earned a certificate in Physical Theatre from the London International School of Performing Arts, and a certificate from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. B.A. with Honors from Northwestern University. M.A. in Oral History at Columbia University.

Nicki Pombier is an oral historian, writer, dramaturg and educator, whose work engages the arts, disability rights and social change. She is an oral history artist with the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University, and teaches in the New School College of Performing Arts and in the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University, where she earned her M.A. in Oral History. She has an M.F.A. in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a Bachelor of Science in the Foreign Service, Culture and Politics from Georgetown University.