Fanny Julissa García is an award winning Honduran-American oral historian contributing work to Central American Studies. She is a renown public speaker on applied oral history, the art and craft of interviewing, and storytelling. She is represented by Embrace Change Speaker’s Bureau.

Fanny graduated with a Bachelors degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master’s degree in Oral History from Columbia University where she received the Judge Jack B. Weinstein Scholarship Award for Oral History and the OHMA Oral History Teaching and Social Justice Award. Her thesis, Reminiscences on Migration: A Central American Lyric about Central American migration received runner up recognition for the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as Communications Coordinator for Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change, a network of oral historians, activists, cultural workers, community organizers and documentary artists that use oral history to further movement building and transformative social change.

In 2019, she was awarded the Emerging Crisis Fund Award from the Oral History Association for Separated: An Oral History Project that documents the stories of families separated under the Trump Administration’s Zero Tolerance policy. From 2020 to 2021, she worked on the project with funding from the Women’s Refugee Commission and Barnard College. In 2022, she received a fellowship from the Oral History Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue the project in collaboration with Justice in Motion.

She has taught workshops and presented events on oral history across the country at universities and for organizations including Barnard College, Trinity College, DePaul University, American University, New York University, the DC Oral History Collaborative, Whitman College, Mt. Sinai Medical Center, California Institute of Integral Studies, the Oral History Association, the New-York Historical Society, and Texas After Violence Project. She has also presented her work for the Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region and at the National Latinx Conference on HIV, HCV, and SUD.

Fanny Julissa García nació en San Pedro Sula, Honduras y se crio en México y en Los Ángeles, California. Ella es una historiadora oral trabajando en el campo de estudios centroamericanos y historias de migración y detención. La historia oral es la recopilación y el estudio de información histórica utilizando grabaciones de sonido por medio de entrevistas con personas que tienen conocimiento personal de eventos pasados o que están ocurriendo. Ella ha trabajado como asistente legal y traductora en centros de detención en la frontera entre los Estados Unidos y México. Antes de su carrera en el campo de la historiadora oral, trabajó por mas de 15 años combatiendo el impacto del VIH/SIDA a la salud y el estatus socioeconómico de comunidades de bajos recursos en Los Ángeles, California. Durante este tiempo, también apoyo a personas impactadas por la violencia sexual y domestica. Ella recibió sus estudios en University of California, Los Ángeles y Columbia University en Nueva York.


“I really appreciated the open dialogue and exchange of ideas with all participants that Fanny facilitated. I enjoyed that we dug into why we have to approach oral history a certain way.” - Connor Snow, Brooklyn Historical Society