Saaret yoseph biography of alberta
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Originally from Texas, Alandro is passionate about conservation, both environmental and cultural. The ability to visually render history, with a critical and intentional lens, provides us with a unique opportunity to engage with the past in unexpected ways. The experience opened my eyes to the beauty and boundless potential for Mixed Reality. It is her hope that the U Street archive will be used by future generations to remember and celebrate the neighborhood's rich past.
JULIAN DOWELL
Georgetown University
ALUMNI
SAARET YOSEPH
Saaret E.
Yoseph is a writer, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist with a background in cultural studies, documentary film, and digital storytelling. Saaret is a first-generation District native, whose parents immigrated from Ethiopia in the 1970s. Miranda is excited to use her passion in computer science to serve the U Street community and learn from the wonderful experience.
CHAU LE
Georgetown University ('23)
Georgetown University ('21)
Chau is a senior at Georgetown University studying computer science and history.
Miranda grew up in Germantown, Md., and has possessed a passion for problem-solving ever since she was young. There is so much commonality among us, so many intersections across communities—even outside of the continent.
For example, I can connect with a lot of the expectations placed on my South Asian female friends, who are also first-generation and raised by immigrant parents, but there are also plenty of cultural assumptions and biases that warrant challenging.
Both within and outside of our communities, we have to be cognizant of colorism, anti-Blackness, and internalized racism.
(You can see a presentation of her thesis here.) Her passion for the forgotten histories of the South Asian diaspora allowed her to serve the community of U Street and as a member of the “Remembering YoU” project team.
JOURNEY(S)
Transcription/ Translation/ Production Assistance
Description:Inspired by poet Ntozake Shange’s acclaimed choreopoem For Colored Girls, director/producer Saaret E.
Yoseph sifts through her own cultural biography, creating a short-form audio series that follows the stories of Ethiopian women, who arrived in the District prior to or during the 1980s. During her senior year, Sonali wrote a history thesis on Ben’s Chili Bowl in the U Street Corridor based on the oral history interviews she collected with the Ali family as part of her work on this project.
Chakravarti's past work in digital archiving and public history includes creating a digital archive of manuscripts and rare books in Goa, supported by the British Library Endangered Archives Programme, and co-founding the Theory and Practice Workshop at the American University in Cairo, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which sought to rethink humanistic theory and practice from her location in post-revolutionary Cairo.
She is a West Coast transplant who enjoys frequenting D.C. museums, parks, and libraries in her free time. Being a resident of Howard campus, close to the Shaw-U Street neighborhood, she was inspired to become involved in the research effort. Right now, for instance, I’m working on a project that centers the real-life story of Dorothy Hadley Bayen, a Black American woman from the Midwest who married a member of Haile Selassie’s family and actually lived in Ethiopia during the Second Italian-Ethiopian War.
I’ve also learned about other Black Pan-Africanist figures—in America and the Caribbean—who were dealing with similar challenges in terms of reaching across difference, and who built critical cross-cultural bridges.
Those are the kinds of stories that inspire me and offer a blueprint for me as a creative.”
What parts of family, language, or cultural memory feel urgent to preserve—and what feels necessary to transform?
“Ironically, I struggle with language, as a writer.
In addition to her oral history project, JOURNEY(S), Saaret is also pursuing other narrative experiments and creative inquiries, including a poetry chapbook and a loosely-autobiographical feature script.
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The liveliness of U Street and the historical gems that line the street all add to the culture of Shaw-U.Moreover, her work within this research project is part of her undergraduate studies on a pre-law path. At the moment, I'm developing an event-planning app for iOS called Blitz, which a few dozen students are using in the beta stages. But I know audiences are eager for diversity.
I remember interviewing filmmaker Sam ‘Blitz’ Bazawule (The Burial of Kojo, The Color Purple) and he said something along the lines of, ‘The white imagination has run out of ideas.’ And I couldn’t agree more.
Honestly, the gatekeepers just need to get out of the way and give us free rein.
Or actually, as is happening already, Black creators are innovating outside of systems of power and that’s a beautiful thing to see.
Maya S.
Cade recently wrote a piece for SEEN journal, ‘Portals and Expansions: Black Film Distribution,’ and she emphasized how ‘Capital is not the only thing to gain,’ and how ‘care must remain at the center’ of our work, which I think is so profound.
She asks, ‘How can we move beyond a system that becomes an echo chamber for white sensibilities?’ Say that, sis!”
What are the most significant gaps between Africans in the diaspora and Black communities everywhere—and how might we begin to bridge them meaningfully?
“So much of the bridge-building work has already been done, so I try to focus on highlighting those existing connections and amplifying the voices of her-story makers, like Dorothy, who we should be more familiar with.
I remember reading about another woman in one of the archived Black newspapers I found in my research at the Schomburg Center.
This woman ended up being one of the co-founders of the Ethiopian World Federation, which was an advocacy and fundraising organization during and after the war.
She was living in New York, her family was from the West Indies, and she moved to Ethiopia to help the war effort.
She lived there, learned to speak fluent Amharic, and came back, having adopted a child from Ethiopia, I think.
There’s another figure like Josiah Arnold Ford—he and his wife, I believe, were from Barbados.
Josiah wrote ‘The Universal Ethiopian Anthem’ for Marcus Garvey’s UNIA.
His family ended up moving to Ethiopia and staying through the war.
His wife founded a school; they raised their children there.
I mean, these past connections feel so palpable to me that I source as much from them as I can in terms of how to continue facilitating and creating bridges.”
This interview is part of an ongoing series highlighting African and Black diasporic creatives who are rooted in or returning to the continent—artists, thinkers, and cultural workers reshaping identity, belonging, and what it means to bridge the gaps.
DR.
In tandem with this project, she is producing a multidisciplinary project about the legacy of the Ethiopian diaspora in Washington, D.C. Part narrative, part documentary, the independent project will pair oral histories from D.C. with visual archives from the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa. I'm from South Windsor, Connecticut, and I am the youngest in a family of seven.