Documenting Stories: Oral History Production and Best Practices

Join us for a presentation on oral history production, equipment, software and set ups with a focus on productions with small budgets!

Oral Historian, Artist, Writer, Alan Nakagawa will base this workshop on his thirty-nine years of interdisciplinary art projects using oral history as a base for working with diverse communities.

Nakagawa has worked for educational, non-profit and government institutions with varying budgets and scopes. Keeping a flexible production methodology while listening to the needs of the collaborators, he has built a portfolio of experiences reflecting diverse needs.

Meet the Instructor!

Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories. He has created a series of Invisible Architecture experiences that are mash ups of the recorded acoustics of historical sites, giving new context to historic places through a contemporary lens of sound. Nakagawa has been working on a series of semi-autobiographic sound-architecture/tactile sound experiences, utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors; Peace Resonance; Hiroshima/Wendover combines recordings of the interiors of the Hiroshima Atomic Dome (Hiroshima, Japan) and Wendover Hangar (Utah). His first book, “A.I.R.Head: Anatomy of an Artist in Residence” was published in January 2023 by Writ-Large Press. It maps his artistic trajectory that led to his nine Artist-in-residencies in six years.