An Excerpt from Finding Fathers: An Oral History of Uncertainty

By Emma Courtland, 2016
Listen to this edited audio piece through OHMA’s SoundCloud channel

Alessandra R is a 31 year old MSW candidate at CalState Northridge. This clip was edited from a full-length interview focused on the experience of finding her estranged father.

Since graduating from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in English, Emma Courtland has worked as a writer, editor, film programmer, and exhibitions curator for periodicals and nonprofits in her native city, Los Angeles.

The bulk of her professional efforts, however, has been on behalf the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where she spent the last seven years collaborating to devise and execute a full slate of public programs focused on the vast and ever-changing intersections of storytelling and technology. She is especially interested in cultural form and narrative cognition, and how our modes of sharing stories—written or spoken words, still or moving images—shape our understanding of and interactions with the world.