listening for the story
Listen for a while and you'll notice that people speak powerfully, even poetically, about the extraordinary and the everyday experiences that make up their lives. We get the full story in long interviews for posterity and edit people's own words to compose shareable pieces. Here is a selection of Leyla Vural’s work.
films
Leyla edits each 4-5 hour oral history she conducts with a scientist at The Rockefeller University into a short film. Click above to watch neurobiologist Mary Beth Hatten talk about her life and work, and creativity in scientific research. Click here to see the collection of films.
writing
To commemorate the Amalgamated Bank’s centennial in 2023, Leyla wrote, edited, and art directed a book, “Stories from 100 Years of Social Responsibility,” consisting of more than 50 stories, each based on her archival research or an interview she conducted.
Liquid Steel, by art critic and poet John Yau and published by Rizzoli New York in 2023, is the first comprehensive monograph of sculptor John Pai’s work. The book draws heavily on the oral history Leyla conducted with John Pai.
Leyla’s essay “rest in peace? the moral topography of New York City’s potter’s field” was published in the 2023 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, you are here: the journal of creative geography.
The catalogue accompanying The Unseen Professors sculpture exhibit (Nov. 2021-Feb. 2022) at Tim Kim Gallery in New York includes a lengthy excerpt from John Pai’s oral history with Leyla.
Leyla’s review of Janis Thiessen’s Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour was published online in November 2020 and in the spring 2021 print edition of Oral History Review.
Leyla’s peer-reviewed article, Potter’s field as heterotopia, was selected as the public history essay in the Autumn 2019 issue of the Oral History Society’s journal, Oral History.
Amor Mundi, the weekly newsletter of The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, selected Leyla’s piece, “Reading in Berlin: Thoughts on Jill Stauffer's Ethical Loneliness,” as one of its "favorite essays...from around the web."
In 2019, Leyla presented this paper, “I Remembered You,” at a conference on loss at McGill University in Montreal.
audio stories
The inaugural exhibit in the Korean Cultural Center New York’s new building was a retrospective, entitled “Eternal Moment,” of sculptor John Pai’s work. Leyla edited 4 audio stories from the oral history with Pai and conducted the interview for the film accompanying the show.
interview collections
In the Columbus Avenue and the Upper West Oral History Project, Leyla interviewed local merchants, developers, long-time residents, and neighborhood activists, who tell the story of neighborhood change as they have shaped and experienced it since the late 1960s. The Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District sponsored this project and the interview collection is held at The New York Historical.
The Stonewall Oral History Project—a project of the National Park Service in partnership with The LGBT Community Center and the Tenement Museum—is about LGBTQ life in New York before and after the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, as much as it is about the uprising itself. Leyla conducted more than 20 of the 80 interviews in this collection. The interviews are available online and held at The LGBT Community Center National History Archive.
stonewall oral history project interview excerpts
The New York Preservation Archive Project’s Saving Preservation Stories oral history collection captures the narratives of New Yorkers who usually get left out of the historic preservation story. A team of interviewers, including Leyla, has conducted these interviews over several years.