Ricia Anne Chansky

Director of the Oral History Lab

Ricia Anne Chansky is a full professor in the English Department, the Senior Climate Justice Fellow at the Humanities Action Lab, an Assembling Voices Fellow at The Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) at Columbia University, a Fulbright Specialist in American Studies, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Latin America and the Caribbean at York University, and was recognized as a Climate Justice Activist of Note by the Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance. She has won awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, the Oral History Association, Voice of Witness, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Chansky is coeditor of The Divided States: Unraveling National Identity in the Twenty-First Century (UWP, 2023), Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico (Haymarket Books, 2021), Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas (Routledge, 2020), and The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, a Routledge Literary Theory Reader (2016); editor of Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing (Routledge, 2017) and Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives (Routledge, 2016); and coauthor of Maxy Survives the Hurricane/Maxy sobrevive el huracán (Arte Público Press, 2021).

Jaquelina E. Alvarez

OHL Co-Director

Jaquelina E. Álvarez is the Oral History Lab (OHL) Co-Director and the Graduate Research and Innovation Center (GRIC) Coordinator at the UPRM University Library. She leads several campus digital strategy initiatives and partnerships, including Scholar@UPRM, the institutional repository. Currently, she is Co-PI of “Listening to Puerto Rico: The Promise of Oral History On-Campus and Beyond,” a $500,000 project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH Award# ZDH-284106-22) and “Speaking into the Silences: Building Community Archives across the Puerto Rican Archipelago” project supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). She organizes and teaches workshops and training sessions on digital literacy, scholarly communication, intellectual property, and data management. She has worked to incorporate information literacy into the UPRM’s STEM curriculum by participating in programs sponsored by the NSF, HHMI, NEH, and DoEd.

Previously, she was the PI of an NEH Chairman’s Emergency Grant (NEH Award PB-260678- 18), a co-PI of “Building Capacity for Collection Care and Disaster Preparedness” project (NEH Award PG-263517-19), and a five-year (2014-2021), $2.6 million grant awarded by the DoEd under the Promoting Postbaccalaureate Opportunities for Hispanic Americans (PPOHA) Program. She holds an M.A. (1997) and Specialist Certificate (1999) in Library and Information Studies from the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison.

Raisa Bonnet Ocasio

Film Lecturer

Raisa Bonnet is a director of fiction films and documentaries who lives in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. She also works as a screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor, and directs commercials for The Young Collective. Born to bookstore owners in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, Raisa Bonnet naturally grew up to become a storyteller and filmmaker. Her work often deals with women’s issues and familial relationships in her home country. She earned her MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and her BA in Audiovisual Communications at the University of Puerto Rico, where she is now a film professor.

She is the recipient of many awards and grants including the Raúl Julia Scholarship awarded each year to a Puerto Rican student to pursue studies in film, a full scholarship from New York University, and a Peter D. Gold Scholarship, and the award for Best Cinematography for her work on the short film Mano Santo in the 2020 in the Cortadito competition of the European Film Festival of Puerto Rico. Her short film Luna vieja (2013) has been screened in many film festivals in Puerto Rico and around the world. Her first feature film, Trenzas, is currently in development. Bonnet has taught for the Film Certificate since 2015. She teaches CINE3005: Writing the Short Film, Introduction to the Documentary, and has offered workshops on film directing, screenwriting, and cinematography.

“As a professor of Introduction to Documentary, we have managed to film several short documentaries of Oral History. It is very satisfying for me to have discovered the similarities between documentary and oral history. In addition, it has been very interesting to collaborate with teachers and students of Oral History to create documentaries.”

Marci Denesiuk

Oral History Lecturer

Marci Denesiuk is an award-winning Canadian writer with a background in journalism and creative writing. Her recent publications include the Voice of Witness book Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico (Haymarket, 2021, co-edited with Ricia Chansky). She teaches oral history, creative writing, and literature in UPRM’s Department of English.

Marci Denesiuk teaches oral history classes with a focus social justice. She gives instruction on interviewing, transcription, translation, ethics, and on shaping creative nonfiction stories from oral history interviews. In addition, she helps to collect and organize material generated from oral history interviews for various appropriate archives.

Guillermo Gómez

Film Lecturer

Guillermo Gómez is a documentary filmmaker who lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He holds a master’s degree in Creative Documentary from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and a master’s degree in Audiovisual Production from the UPR School of Communications. He has extensive experience in film production, has produced, directed, co-directed, has written scripts for numerous documentaries and musical videos for many Puerto Rican bands. His documentaries include La Escena (2005), Aquel Rebaño Azul (2009), and Una identidad en Absurdo, Vol. 1 (2011). He received a Suncoast Emmy for Máter Atómica, a web series on nuclear power in Puerto Rico made for WIPR-TV. Professor Gómez has taught for the Film Certificate since 2009. He teaches CINE4016: Film Production – The Creative Documentary, CINE4017: Film Production – Fiction, as well as workshops on film editing and other aspects of film production.

José J. Morales Benítez

Research Services Librarian

Jose J. Morales-Benitez is the Research Services Librarian in the Graduate Research and Innovation Center (GRIC) at the General Library of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM). He provides support services to graduate students and faculty in all stages of the research process. José creates online educational objects and workshops on topics such as research data management, scholarly communications, and discovery and evaluation of scientific information sources, plus he co-manages UPRM’s institutional repository, Scholar@UPRM.
José has overseen the creation of bilingual metadata guidelines for the oral histories collected by the OHL, as well as upload of the oral histories to Scholar@UPRM. He also works on augmenting the visibility of the OHL’s work through digital humanities online platforms. Finally, José has created online educational guides on topics related to the OHL’s activities, such as digital preservation and oral history methodology.

Caroline Gil Rodríguez

Caroline Gil Rodríguez is a time-based media conservator and audiovisual archivist from Puerto Rico. Caroline has worked at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wildlife Conservation Society and the Smithsonian Institution amongst other cultural heritage institutions. Caroline holds a M.A. in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University, an M.A. in Cinematography from the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals (ESCAC) and a B.A. in Visual Arts. She is currently the Director of Media Collections and Preservation at Electronic Arts Intermix, a New York based non-profit dedicated to the distribution, promotion and preservation of media art.

Mary Leonard

Director of the UPRM Film Certificate

Mary Leonard is a full professor in the English Department of the University of Puerto Rico – Mayaguez Campus where she teaches courses in film, media and literature. She is also the founder and director of the university’s film program, the UPRM Film Certificate. She has presented her work at conferences in many countries, published articles in peer-reviewed journals as well as in local publications in Puerto Rico, been invited to lecture and present Puerto Rican films at universities in the U.S. and in Trinidad, and been interviewed numerous times on television and radio programs.

Mary Leonard is one of the recipients of a National Endowment of the Humanities grant for the 2022 year which is funding the establishment of an Oral History Center at UPRM. Her work during the grant year has focused on the establishment of the documentary film production component of the Lab. This has entailed transferring the film equipment of the Film Certificate to the Lab, determining with colleagues the new film equipment to be purchased for it, working with both Oral History and Film Certificate professors on the development of documentary film courses that tell stories of Puerto Ricans based on oral histories, and which will be added to the OHL Data Archive, and publicizing this work. She has also collaborated on the design of the symposia that will introduce the OHL to the University of Puerto Rico – Mayaguez community, and to our community partners.