About
Nyssa Chow
oral historian | interdisciplinary artist | writer
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The approach to oral history that I have been evolving and teaching in the last few years was born out of the realization that the archives of oral histories were replete with silences. This was particularly true inside the testimonies of BIPOC people and immigrants. As a Black, first-generation immigrant listening to these oral histories, I realized that too often I did not recognize, in full(ness), the people recorded there. I could hear the silences, the absences, the withholdings—what was subsumed and foreclosed inside the form of these oral history encounters. I began by asking, what more was it possible to hear? What is the relationship between silences and sovereignty/silences and agency? Could we reimagine both the form of the interview, and an approach to listening, that would differently permission that space, and invite narrators to be the first interpreters of their lived experiences? One that would invite their authorship (authorship defined as the agency to control their contextualization); would recognize their already-there authority to name and define the world and their experience(s); would honor embodied knowledge as particular expertise of/about our shared world. I have been practicing and teaching a way of thinking of oral history as spontaneous literature; advocating for an approach that imagines an archive of (embodied) knowledges—a collection of knowledge(s) of people(s), rather than about people(s); of listening for ways of being and ways of knowing. It’s not enough to interview more people, or even just a larger diversity of people—the way that these interviews are conducted matters. If we’re not intentional about our approach to listening (oral history practice), we risk reproducing the power dynamics that beget and institute these silences and erasures in the first place.ription text goes heres here
Nyssa Chow is an oral historian, interdisciplinary artist, and writer.
Most recently, she was the Interim Director of the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University (OHMA). She served as core faculty for seven years, teaching oral history theory and practice, literary nonfiction, and documentary arts. She was a Visiting Scholar at The Humanities Council at Princeton University. She is the co-creator and Lead Artist Facilitator for the DocX Labs at The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, co-created with documentarian Stephanie Owens. The DocX Fellowship was founded to support artists in the documentary arts.
Chow was an Assistant Professor in the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) and Film and Media department at Skidmore College, teaching interdisciplinary documentary arts. She was a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at MIT Media Labs (Poetic Justice Group led by artist Ekene Ijeoma) and a co-director of the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project at Columbia University (I.N.C.I.T.E). She has served as Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton University, as Visiting Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, and as Visiting Assistant Professor in the BFA Film Program at Purchase College.
Her recent project is Trace: A Memorial, a permanent monument to essential workers lost to the COVID-19 pandemic, commissioned by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy (CUNY SPH). In acknowledgment of the memorial and for her “outstanding achievements in oral history and the arts,” Chow received formal legislative commendations from the United States House of Representatives, the New York State Senate, the New York State Assembly, the New York City Council, and the New York Public Advocate's Office. To mark the impact of Trace, the Office of the Manhattan Borough President officially declared May 28, 2025, ‘Nyssa Chow Appreciation Day’ in the borough of Manhattan.
Chow was the 2018 Recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein for Literary Oral History, won for the immersive literary oral history project The Story of Her Skin. This project also won the Columbia University Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. She was the 2019-202 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts. Her essay How to Become a Monster, published in Ploughshares Literary Journal, received a Special Mention in Nonfiction in the 2020 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She was a finalist in the 2023 Narratively Profile Award for literary nonfiction. Chow has collaborated with filmmakers and artists, most recently with Jennifer Wen Ma on the exhibition An Inward Sea for the New Britain Museum of Art. Their current collaboration with artist Daniel Arturo Almeida, an expansion of The Inward Sea: Oral History, earned multiple fiscal sponsorships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). Her solo exhibition Still, Life., a series of installations using sound, light, and assemblage, was held at Gallery One in Trinidad. Her artwork Trace: A Memorial was featured in the group exhibition ‘How We Remember’ at the Miriam and Ira D Wallach Art Gallery in New York City. Her work Your Archives Cannot Preserve Us (2024), was exhibited in Re-collections, The LatinX Project.
Chow has conducted oral histories on behalf of arts institutions such as the Archives of American Art and the Smithsonian Institution and has lectured widely on the intersection of art and oral history, embodied knowledge and listening, and literary oral history.
Nyssa was born in Trinidad and is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Film program and Columbia University's Oral History Masters Program.
