Herstory: Mixtape Memories

About the Project

Music, music archives, and mixtapes are powerful mediums for the telling of women’s stories. In 2021, women leaders in the field of sound and music archives from the LA and NY areas came together with community partners to amplify these voices in a community digital zine and curated public programming. HerStory: Mixtape Memories is a collaboration between Autry, BAM Archive, The Mixtape Museum, the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, and KQBH 101.5.
Featuring and curated by:
Liza Posas, Head of Research Services and Archives, Curator Women and the Archives, Autry Museum
Vane Fernandez, DJ/Illustrator/Community Connector
Yuri Shimoda, Archivist, UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive and co-founder of Basement Tapes Day Regan Sommer McCoy, Operations Manager, Creative Social Impact, Brooklyn Academy of Music & Founder of The Mixtape Museum
Brittany Campbell, Manager of Public Engagement, The Autry Museum

On April 17, 2021, the zine came to life in a virtual dialogue with Liza Posas, Vane Fernandez, Yuri Shimoda, and Sommer McCoy.

Leading up to the event, partner KQBH 101.5 hosted a Herstory: Mixtape Memories DJ Takeover from April 12-April 17. LA/NY women/femme DJs and radio shows dedicated their broadcasts/show segments to promote the voices of female musicmaker, storytellers past and present, and playing listeners’ memories in real-time.

KGBH Schedule

About the Curators

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Bios

Yuri Shimoda is an archivist at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive and Assistant Adjunct Professor at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. With a background in music journalism, she obtained her Master’s in Library and Information Science from UCLA’s Media Archival Studies program while working in roles for Los Angeles Public Library, the Autry Museum of the American West, Walt Disney Imagineering, and Visual Communications, the nation’s premier media arts center for Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers. She spent a summer as a Library of Congress Junior Fellow in the Recorded Sound Section of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and is co-founder of Basement Tapes Day, an annual event that provides the public with access to their home audio recordings in cities around the world. Yuri coordinates the Mentoring Program and Continuing Education Series for the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), is a member of the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force, and serves on the Executive Board of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA).

Regan Sommer McCoy has 15+ years of experience in the music industry working with hip-hop artists. She is the founder of The Mixtape Museum, which encourages the research, archiving, and data analysis of mixtapes and seeks to achieve systematic preservation in the DJ and hip-hop communities. In 2016, she launched Hip-Hop Hacks, a hackathon that offers students the opportunity to explore how hip-hop inspires technological innovation. Sommer is a Columbia University A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholar, an Alliance Open Archive Initiative Fellow, and a grantee of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. She is a charter member of the William & Mary Hip-Hop Collection and a Hip-Hop Education Center/Universal Hip-Hop Museum education committee member. By day she manages databases in Education and Community Engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Vane Lissette (she,they) is a community archivist, visual poet, illustrator and DJ at Pocha Punks Power Hour, a radio show on 101.5 FM KQBH in Boyle Heights. She studied film/audio restoration and preservation at UC Santa Bárbara, UNAM in Mexico City, and La Cineteca Nacional, the national film archive of Mexico. Through that work, Lisette became an advocate of DIY restoration and preservation of material memory to restore with stories. Not only has she focused on material archive but has also worked in audio archiving, especially the work she’s dedicated on community radio. Lissette finds ways to connect all these mediums to tell a story (ies) and encourages others to do the same. Follow her on Instagram @aperunicorn  

Liza Posas joined the Autry Museum of the American West in 2005 where she currently serves as the Head of Research Services and Archives. In this capacity, she oversees the long-range planning and implementation of the Autry’s archival program that includes the acquisition, processing, collection management, and curatorial activities of the Autry’s institutional archive and manuscript collections. She is also responsible for developing the reference services for the Libraries and Archives. Liza also holds an appointed faculty position with the USC Libraries as the Coordinator for LA as Subject (LAAS), a collaborative network hosted by the USC Libraries that works to promote and preserve the rich history of Los Angeles and Southern California.