ALLIANCE OPEN ARCHIVE INITIATIVE

Independent media organizations around the world may reflect the diverse cultural identity of communities, but they may also be rendered invisible because the content and stories generated are not being preserved, let alone shared openly. And we live in a world where open sharing of content may result in harm to the artists, producers and journalists who create the work, and well as the subjects who inhabit the stories. Despite advances in technology, media/culture archives are deteriorating at a rapid rate and stories are being lost forever. We felt an urgent need to collaboratively address this issue as a field, to find a collective voice, and to strategize emerging and best practices for creating impactful community-based preservation and access solutions.

The Alliance Open Archive Initiative brings together a group of cultural preservation and storytelling experts with independent, institutional and community-based content creators to collect and synthesize highly accessible, collaborative strategies that address three urgent core questions in the field today:

WHO is telling and preserving the stories?
HOW are organizations and artists addressing the challenge of getting their material preserved and making it accessible, usable, continuous and transformative?
WHAT can organizations and artists do to keep pace with emerging and best practices of preserving and opening their digital archives?

In this first year of the initiative, we are gathering the wisdom from the field in a series of in-person and virtual conversations, with some visionary archivists, technologists, culture bearers and storytellers. After this research phase, we will look towards systemic solutions, and what is needed to preserve and open the collective archives of our communities.

Alliance Open Archive Initiative: 2020 Fellows

Jessi Jumanji

Jessi is a multifaceted visual artist from Memphis,TN, currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. With a passion for African history, nature, and the otherworldly, Jessi explores the many dimensions of Afrofuturism through digital collage and painting using and reimagining archival sources for modern day audiences.

Xaviera Flores

Xaviera is dedicated to the development of scholarly research on the Chicano-Latino population. She oversees all library, archives, and museum services, including outreach, instruction, grant projects, and donor relations.

Cori Olinghouse

Cori Olinghouse is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of performance, archives, and curatorial practice. In 2017 she founded The Portal, a curatorial project dedicated to reimagining how performance practices and embodied histories in motion are archived and understood.

Open Archive Initiative Participant List:

Aden Suchak

Youth Media Fellow

Aden Suchak is a Director, Photographer and Writer based in Upstate New York. He is part of the Youth FX film organization in Albany where he works as a film producer and Director of Education. He is a Media Fellow of the Alliance for Media + Culture Youth Media Network Initiative.

Amerigo Gazaway

Forging an evolution of the “mashup” album format, producer Amerigo Gazaway’s “conceptual collaboration” projects imagine studio sessions between like artists of different genres and eras.

Ann Bennett

Ann Bennett is an Emmy nominated documentary filmmaker and multimedia producer. She produced the NAACP Image Award-winning PBS feature documentary, Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, as well as the multi-platform community engagement initiative, Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR). Bennett’s film credits include; Citizen King and Fisk Jubilee Singers for...

Caroline Alexander

Caroline Alexander worked for PBS and NPR stations for years, then transitioned to private web design and content development in 2005 when she moved to the Berkshires.

Caroline Rubens

Archivist at Appalshop

Caroline Rubens is the Archivist at Appalshop, a central Appalachian media arts center that is celebrating its 50th year. She manages the organization's institutional and donated holdings of audiovisual, photo and paper materials, facilitates access to the collections, and helps to plan and execute public programming.

Casey Davis Kaufman

Associate Director, WGBH Media Library and Archives & Project Manager, American Archive of Public Broadcasting

Casey Davis Kaufman is an audiovisual archivist, project manager and independent consultant who focuses on open access, community archives and oral history, and creative engagement with cultural heritage content.

Cori Olinghouse

Emily Keating

Emily Keating is Director of Development and Education at the Kunhardt Film Foundation (KFF). KFF is a not-for-profit educational media organization that produces documentary films, interviews, and teaching tools about the people and ideas that shape our world.

Eric Doversberger

Eric Doversberger is a technology strategist with deep specialization in interactive data visualization. “I co-founded Harbour to empower creators and simplify the use of visual content within organizations.

Floriane Azoulay

Floriane Azoulay, is the current Director of the institution which was founded shortly after the war as the International Tracing Service (ITS). A French human rights expert, she was appointed head of the institution by the International Committee (IC) of the Arolsen Archives in 2016. Steffen Baumheier became Deputy Director in 2017.

Gerald Seligman

Gerald Seligman is an international music industry professional with over 30 years experience in both major and independent music and music events companies

Jamie Brett

Creative Projects at the Museum of Youth Culture,

I graduated with First Honours in BA Photography in 2013, after a short stint working as a freelance photographer's assistant for commercial photographers and artists.

Jason Wyman

Jason Wyman is many things. Today, they are an artist creating at the intersections of age, geography, identity, practice, politics, and platforms. They value openness, embrace chaos, and love the long view.

Jennifer Cutting

Jennifer Cutting combines a career of preserving and presenting folk and traditional music at the Library of Congress with a career of bringing it to new audiences as a successful performer, producer, and recording artist.

Jessi Jumanji

Jessica Thompson

Jessica Thompson is a GRAMMY-nominated mastering and restoration engineer, audio preservation specialist, and educator.

Jina Valentine

Jina Valentine is a visual artist and Associate Professor of Printmedia at SAIC born in Philadelphia, now based in Chicago. Her independent practice is informed by the intuitive strategies of folk artists and traditional craft techniques, and it interweaves histories latent within found texts, objects, narratives, and spaces.

Jocelyn Arem

Jocelyn Arem is a GRAMMY, ASCAP, and Library of Congress Award-nominated archival storytelling producer and consultant. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, PBS and during GRAMMY Week in Los Angeles.

John Lightfoot

John Lightfoot is Senior Program Officer at California Humanities, an independent nonprofit and a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Joyce LeeAnn Joseph

Joyce LeeAnn Joseph is a certified archivist and an interdisciplinary artist whose work aims to redefine the archive as a space for healing and transformation. She has worked professionally for Weeksville Heritage Center, the Associated Press Corporate Archives, and the New York Public Library. In 2011, she self-published her first archival text, somethymes grief goes for...

Kafi-Ayanna Allah

Kafi-Ayanna Allah is a professional librarian working for Orange County Public Library in Hillsborough, North Carolina as the Adult and Teen Program Coordinator.

Kristin Chang

Kristin Chang is the first part-time Program Manager at the W.O.W. Project and has been involved with W.O.W.’s work for three years, beginning with her participation and leadership within the youth arts and activism program (Resist Recycle Regenerate).

Lauren Walsh

Lauren Walsh is a professor and writer. She teaches at The New School and New York University, where she is the director of the Gallatin Photojournalism Lab.

Lisbet Tellefsen

Lisbet Tellefsen is an Oakland, California-based archivist, collector and curator. Her archives and collections focus on late 20th century African Americana with specializations including the Black Panther Party, Angela Davis, Black LGBT culture and political graphics.

Liza Zapol

Liza Zapol is an artist and an oral historian. She creates sound, multimedia and performance on the themes of creativity, memory and place, using documentary methods. Liza teaches in the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University. Liza Zapol was the Robert and Arlene Kogod Secretarial Scholar, Oral Historian at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian...

Marcos Sueiro Bal

Marcos Sueiro Bal is the Archive Manager at New York Public Radio and the co-chair of the Technical Committee of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.

Miranda Lowe

Miranda Lowe is a Principal Curator and museum scientist at the Natural History Museum, London. She is skilled in Archival Research, Museums, Cataloging, Museum Education, and Cultural Heritage.

Nikki Silva

Nikki Silva is one half of The Kitchen Sisters with long-time friend and producing partner Davia Nelson. They are the creators of hundreds of stories for NPR and public media including the duPont-Columbia and James Beard Award winning series Hidden Kitchens, the Peabody Award winning Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project with Jay...

Wendy Levy

Executive Director

Wendy is the Executive Director of the Alliance for Media Arts And Culture. She is also the founder and director of New Arts Axis and a Senior Consultant with the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program.

Regan Sommer McCoy

Regan Sommer McCoy is the founder of The Mixtape Museum and Hip-Hop Hacks. She is a non-profit arts administrator, music industry vet, and archive and database enthusiast, who is passionate about the interactions of hip-hop, technology, and education.

Ron Haviv

Ron Haviv is an Emmy nominated, award-winning photojournalist, co-founder of the photo agency VII and founder of Lost Rolls America, and has been dedicated to documenting conflict and raising awareness about human rights issues around the globe.

Sanchita Balachandran

Sanchita Balachandran is Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University where she teaches courses related to the technical study and analysis of ancient objects, and the history, ethics and practice of art conservation.

Steve Zeitlin

Steve Zeitlin is the founding director of City Lore, an organization dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage. With a focus on New York, but with an increasing number of projects of national and international scope, City Lore works with grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions.

Tanya De Angelis

Tanya De Angelis leads the Sundance Institute Archives & Collection, which preserves and shares the work of supported artists and the unique history of the Institute and its programs.

Terri Francis

Terri Francis teaches film studies courses and directs the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University. She is a scholar of Black film and critical race theory whose work involves archival research, cultural history, and visual analysis, set within the vicissitudes of performance and representation.

Tom Ciaburri

Tom Ciaburri is a filmmaker committed to storytelling that amplifies lesser heard voices.

Vincent Morisset

Vincent Morisset is a director known for his artful use of technology and interactivity. He’s also the founder of the studio AATOAA (pronounced à toi, meanings ‘yours’). Vincent has been celebrated worldwide to successfully revisit and change how we experience music videos, videogames, album artwork, films and virtual reality.

Yuri Shimoda

While obtaining a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from UCLA’s media archival studies program, Yuri Shimoda worked for the UCLA Music Library, UCLA Library Special Collections, and as a UCLA Community Archives Lab/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation intern.

Yvette Ramírez

Born and raised in Queens, NY, Yvette Ramírez is an arts administrator, oral-historian, and archivist-in-training.