Team

Co-Directors

MICHELLE CASWELL, PhD, (she/her), Co-Director, is a Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive, an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of two books: Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), as well as more than three dozen peer-reviewed articles.  

THUY VO DANG (she/her), Co-Director, is Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA specializing in oral history, archival studies, and ethnic studies. She is coauthor of the books, A People’s Guide to Orange County (UC Press, 2022) and Vietnamese in Orange County (Arcadia Publishing, 2015) and serves on the board of directors for Arts Orange County and the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association.

TONIA SUTHERLAND (she/her), Co-Director, is Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. Global in scope, Suther­land’s research focuses on entanglements of technology and culture, with particular emphases on critical and liberatory work within the fields of archival studies, digital studies, and science and technology studies. Sutherland is the author of Resurrecting the Black Body: Digital Afterlives in the 21^st Century (UC Press, 2023). She is also a faculty affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU and Co-Director of AfterLab at the University of Washington’s iSchool.

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Past Team Members

MARIAM SYED is the Graduate Student Researcher for the Community Archives Internship program and is a second year MLIS student at University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in Archival Studies. Previously, she worked as the Collection Management Student Assistant at the UCLA Library Special Collections.

KWANDA M. M. SCOTT-FORD is the Graduate Student Researcher, Community Archives Internship program, and doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at University of California Los Angeles with an emphasis on media archives. She obtained her Masters degree in Cultural Studies with a certificate in Africana Studies and Media Studies emphasis from Claremont Graduate University. She has written historiographies on costume designers, transnational film and television in the 1960s, Black diaspora popular culture, and sites of memory as knowledge production. Before relocating to Los Angeles, she earned a Masters in Human Services Counseling and a bachelor in Liberal Arts from National-Louis University in Chicago.

AYANTU TIBESO is an Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow and doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA with a concentration in archival studies. Her primary research interests explore the intersections of archives, historical knowledge production, and indigenous knowledge and recordkeeping systems. Her work is rooted in African contexts with Ethiopia at the center of much of her analysis. She is passionate about decolonizing knowledge and revaluing and harnessing indigenous knowledge for the well being of communities globally.

ORAISON H. LARMON is a doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previous to pursuing doctoral studies, they worked in the archives at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. Through archival studies and performance studies, Larmon’s research examines how bodies are records that enact broader archival discourses.  Their research addressing the practical, theoretical, and methodological challenges of archiving performance art has been presented at The New School, Pratt Institute, and New York University, among other institutions. Larmon is editor of Franklin Furnace: Performance & Politics (HemiPress, 2018). https://www.oraisonlarmon.info/

MARIKA CIFOR is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Information and Library Science at the University of Indiana, Bloomington and Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. In 2017 she received her PhD from the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Marika’s interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on developing complex understandings of how marginalized individuals and communities come to define themselves, their social groups and movements, and their past, present and future through archives, new media, and data produced within digital cultures. https://marikacifor.com

GRACEN BRILMYER is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University where they focus on the history of natural history museums and archives. Brilmyer’s research uses disability studies as a critical lens to trace how disabled and racialized bodies get conflated with animality within natural history and how biological collections can be politicized as colonial tools. More broadly, they are interested in how, historically, archives have been wielded as interments of power to categorize, contain and control disabled people. http://gracenbrilmyer.com/.

JOYCE GABIOLA Joyce Gabiola is an archivist who preserves materials documenting LGBTQI+ histories of the American South. Previously, they were a doctoral student at UCLA. Gabiola worked in MIT’s Curation and Preservation Services Lab and at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center as an ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow. They are interested in researching the system, actors, and interfaces of whitenessharmdiversity in archives, libraries, and higher education. As a queer Filipinx settler from Texas, Gabiola has a particular interest in preserving materials and stories that connect us to the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ Asians from/of the American South and the ways in which standardized archival practices have a disempowering impact on marginalized communities–past, present and future.

MARIO H. RAMIREZ is the Head of Special Collections and Archives at California State University, Los Angeles. Previously, he was a CLIR/DLF-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington where he was also an Affiliated Researcher with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He obtained a PhD in Information Studies and Certificate in Experimental Critical Theory from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017. He also holds an M.S. in Library and Information Science, and Certificate in Archives and Records Management from Long Island University, C.W. Post, an M.A. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His publications include “On “Monstrous” Subjects and Human Rights Documentation,” “Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative,” and “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives.”

JESSICA TAI earned her Master of Library and Information Science at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Her research interests include community engagement and archival outreach as they pertain to the preservation and access of photographic collections. Jessica is currently the Resident Processing Archivist at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

JIMMY ZAVALA is the Project Coordinator Librarian at the University of California, Irvine, for ‘Transforming Knowledge/Transforming Libraries’, an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded research project that seeks to explore the outcomes of undergraduate students applying what they learn in ethnic studies combined with lived experience in contributing to community archives. In 2017, he earned his Master of Library and Information Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

NOAH GERACI is a librarian and archivist originally from San Diego, California, now based in the Inland Empire. Noah works at UC Riverside Library, holds an MLIS from UCLA (2016), and is a former intern at the Freedom Archives in San Francisco.

ALDA ALLINA MIGONI is a librarian at the Library of Congress, in the South American Section of the Africa, Latin America, and Western Europe Division. In 2016 she earned her M.L.I.S. and M.A. in Latin American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).