From February to April 2023, OFN helped bring 6 Ukrainian artists to the University of Oregon campus, providing UO students and the larger Eugene community with an opportunity to learn about Ukrainian culture and its role in the current Ukrainian resistance towards Russian invasion. The series featured folksinger and traditional dancer Inna Kovtun, bandura player… Continue reading
Come join us for our Oregon Culture Nights series highlighting our current year’s Traditional Apprenticeship Artists Program awardees. The Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program is a yearly program that offers a $3,500 stipend to traditional master artists and culture keepers to aid in the teaching of their traditional arts to an apprentice from their same community.… Continue reading
After years of ups and downs in funding, the Oregon Folklife Network is pleased to announce it has been awarded $20,000 from the Oregon Arts Commission. This grant is designated to assist OFN in reaching its goal of financial stability after significant, campus-wide funding cuts in 2018. Major revisions to the University of Oregon’s budget… Continue reading
We thank these Winter and Spring Graduate Employees for your service and say goodbye to Program Coordinator, Tim Herrera, who moved on to a teaching position at UO’s Department of Anthropology, and Fullbright Fellow, Iryna Stavynska (Ukraine), who spent a full year supporting OFN. Interested in joining the team? Contact us for short-term opportunities, or watch for the Program Coordinator position opening in late summer!
Jessica Oravetz is a first-year M.A. student in Folklore and Public Culture. She earned her B.A. in History and German with a minor in Honors Interdisciplinary Studies from Western Washington University. She was deeply inspired by her mentors and professors at WWU to pursue teaching and interdisciplinary, humanities-focused studies at the graduate level. Her primary interests lie in asking what it means to live well. She hopes to explore the emotional experience as a part of the human experience, and how people have turned to folklore in order to navigate those waters. Her other interests include dipping chocolate truffles, fostering kittens for the local humane society, and playing the harp.
Oravetz assisted OFN with coordinating its Culture Fest program, which connects Oregon arts institutions with OFN’s Culture Keepers Roster to lead events.
Elise O’Brien is a graduate student in Folklore Studies and Landscape Architecture at University of Oregon. She lives, works and plays in rural Lane County. Her research is interdisciplinary and flows from the confluence of culture and design. Elise enjoys crossing the rural/urban divide, works with art supply access for the unhoused (might art supplies be considered a basic need?), leads guided meditations to envision design potentialities, and endlessly ponders utopian imaginaries. She asks: “Are there cultural solutions for design issues?” Are there spatial solutions for cultural problems?” Elise is on the local planning committee for American Folklore Society in Portland Nov 1-4, 2023 and also works for the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub. Her future work will be in climate resilience, and she is presently inspired by how folk life acts as resistance to imperial and colonial projects.
Summer staff include Yosser Saidane and CiCi Becker, plus interns Ariel Lutnesky and Cassie Hoglund.
By Riki Saltzman, Folklore Specialist and retired Executive Director When I started at OFN in the spring of 2012, I didn’t know much about Oregon, and I found that there hadn’t been a lot of recent fieldwork to identify and document folk and traditional artists. Under OFN’s then program manager, Emily Hartlerode (acting director), OFN… Continue reading
The call for applications for this year’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program has closed on October 31st and we are happy to announce that we have received nine applications. We are very delighted to have a geographically and culturally rich cohort of candidates this year. It is always a delight to be able to assist Oregon… Continue reading
Supporting Oregon Folklife Network with your donation, advocacy, and participation directly and positively impacts social cohesion in our state and is critically important to our world. Your support enables us to elevate Oregon’s diverse expressions of culture while amplifying our common drive to intimately know and practice our traditional roots. Donate, and double down your… Continue reading
Timothy Herrera is the new program coordinator. Timothy recently graduated with a PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Oregon and has previous experience as a program coordinator for Centro Latino Americano. In addition to bringing deep skills for working reciprocally with communities, Timothy is a Spanish speaker. He will be the primary contact… Continue reading
OFN intern and a Fulbright scholar from Ukraine, Iryna Stavynska, curated a Tiny Gallery exhibit Amplifying Ukrainian Voices, devoted to Ukrainian folk artists in Oregon. The exhibit is part of the Knight Library’s Tiny Galleries project that aimed to transform historic phone booths into places for UO students to present their research and engage with a wider… Continue reading
Traditional skill/art/craft: Guinean drumming and dancing 2016-2017 Apprentice: Mamadouba “Papa” Yansane Filmed by: Emily West Hartlerode Edited by: Erin Wai Watch Alseny’s previous video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd2jv… Learn more about Alseny and the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program at Oregon Folklife Network https://mnch.uoregon.edu/taap-awardee…
