Liú M.z.h. Chen

Develops and executes innovative, equity-focused strategic plans for the Oral History Archive and Collective, including training programs, archival policies and best practices, ethics, work plans, engagement and participatory co-design strategies, budgets, grant writing/reporting, evaluation metrics, staffing, and quality standards. Leads contract negotiations for NPHM's first staff union.

Manages NPHM Oral History Archive.

• Creates and oversees efficient post-production workflows for management of oral history database with over 150 interviews.
• Designed, piloted, facilitates, evaluates, and refines Archive Working Group to be central decision-making structure and participatory body for archival infrastructure (policy, best practices, website, archive activations), drawing on equity tools from Chicago United for Equity Fellowship. Working Group is always > 50% directly impacted (i.e., lived experience in public housing) and conducts additional engagement initiatives with public housing residents, archivists, and programmatic partners.
• Leads co-design processes for establishing archival policies and best practices, including facilitating synthesis groups, writing, editing, and periodic evaluations.
• Manages, edits, and approves all oral history public curation projects, including Out of the Archives podcast, museum site audio installments, digital audiograms and projects, showcases of program graduates' work, and educational resources. Leads curation of some archival activation projects.
• Cultivates relationships and programmatic collaborations with community organizers, educators, creators, archivists, and others through outreach, trainings, events, and conferences.

Manages NPHM Oral History Collective and training programs.

• Develops national, interconnected, and diverse network of oral historians with lived, and other self-defined meaningful, experience with public housing
• Created, develops, and executes year-long, social justice-oriented training program, “The Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History,” with over 35 intergenerational participants. Mentors Beauty Turner Academy graduates for long-term career development, including negotiating contracts and staff positions at NPHM.
• Researches, pilots, and refines innovative equity-centered approaches to workforce development, staffing, program development, and project management.
• Led grant application and project management of mass incarceration oral history project executed by formerly-incarcerated researchers from project design through presentation.
• Supervises training, evaluation, contracts, and performance management of over 15 contractors working on archive and training programs.

Managed Voices Lifted: The African American Experience in Maryland oral history project including overseeing budget, writing project best practices, editing and organizing documentation including legal paperwork, conducting interviews, conducting post-production, and consulting Advisory Committee.

• Wrote and managed project infrastructure with focus on continuity and consistency throughout life of project. Included writing project Principles and Best Practices handbook to streamline and create consistency for every step of oral history process.
• Proactively advocated for and responsive to narrators wishes and concerns, including increasing power over interview process and outputs.
• Conducted outreach, preparation, and recording for new interviews, including extensive relationship- and trust-building with Maryland African American community.
• Conducted post-production for over 150 new and backlogged interviews (includes audio editing, transcription, indexing, and metadata generation)
• Consulted Advisory Committee quarterly on project direction, including presenting analyzing themes and demographics.

Performed oral history-related editing, writing, research and consulting for Oral History MA program and its associated research center, focused on needs of students with marginalized identities.

• Developed strong relationships with peers in program, listening to concerns and brainstorming institutional solutions.
• Advised professors on revising their syllabi for greater diversity of cited expert perspectives, focusing on black, indigenous, and other perspectives of color; and perspectives of disabled people.
• Consulted professors and students about accessibility in coursework and program practices. Trained other students in accessibility software.
• Audit-edited oral history transcripts.

• Reviewed, edited, and provided feedback for two sets of written programmatic materials, such as teaching guides and resources, for organization's story collections.

• Audit-edited dozens of oral history interview transcripts for accuracy, clarity, and ease of use. Generated new time-stamped indexes for interviews. Conducted one oral history interview from start to finish.

• Planned, executed, and debriefed monthly in-person campus programming for women and other marginalized genders. Focused on creating new programs specifically for survivors of sexual assault and violence, for whom no constructive resources existed prior.

• Thesis: the tidal flats, a creative non-fiction pilot audio documentary. Focuses on gender, race, imperialism, power, kinship, and familial storytelling with four trans Asian narrators.
• 4.20 GPA

• Thesis: No Last Words: Class, Cultural Production, and the Black Radical Tradition in the Pre-Classical Civil Rights Movement, 1909–1948.
• 3.87 GPA