Mojgan Samardar, Ph.D.
Community Voices producerMojgan started her full-time work after completing a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence. After a very successful 28 year career as a technical geek, she retired in 2017.
While working she attended community voices weekend classes in 2014 and graduated as a Community Voice producer for WYSO Public Radio in Yellow Springs, Ohio. After retirement, Mojgan’s turned to the arts and volunteering activities. She proposed creating community voices stories to highlight immigrants’ voices and contributions in the Miami valley. Her first season production of “The Bind that Ties” in 2020 won first prize in the Radio Documentary of the Associated Press. Season two of the series was broadcast in 2022.
Mojgan’s first glass art adventure was creating large glass mosaics and then she fell in love with glass fusion and watercolor painting. She especially loves glass, the way that light shines through and the way that it reflects light. She uses art to relax and let her inspirations flow.
Mojgan’s first public showing was in the Tipp City Area Arts Council (TCAAC) Art Exhibit in 2018. She won the 1st prize in 3-dimensional arts for her glass fusion and 2nd prize for her watercolor painting. Since then, she has participated and won prizes for her glass fusion, glass mosaic and watercolor paintings in many juried art shows in Tipp City, Piqua, Miamisburg Arts Gallery and Women TriArt Society exhibits. Her glass art is displayed in the Mills Park Hotel, Yellow Springs, Ohio, Miamisburg Arts Gallery, Middletown Art Center, Preble Arts in Eaton, Ohio, Rose City Boutique in Springfield, Ohio and the GlazzArt Studio in Dayton, Ohio.
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Meet Uma Mullapudi from India, who is now a meditation teacher. She talks about teaching meditation classes during the pandemic with Libby Ballengee of Dayton. -
Meet Zous and Josie Garcia. They came to the US from the Philippines as students in 1967. -
Meet Katia Maklouf from Algeria. She talks about how her Dayton roommate has made her transition to life in America so much easier. -
We begin a new season of a series about immigrants in the Miami Valley – it’s called The Bind that Ties. In this iteration we meet Ales Ficko – from Slovenia. -
In this installment, we’ll hear about student activism in the 1960s and 70s in Greene County, home to two historically Black colleges – Central State and Wilberforce University AND Antioch College. Students at all three schools organized protests, marches, sit-ins, rallies, pickets and more during those years, pressing hard and relentlessly for civil rights for African Americans. -
Choco Valdez was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. the most difficult way – on foot, at night, through the cold desert. His wife, Jennie Valdez, knows the story well. -
Mohamed and Ali Al-Hamdani came to the U.S. as refugees with their parents from Iraq, and they have hair raising stories about their experiences during the Iraq war 30 years ago, when they were just little boys. -
Martha Jeannette Rodriguez is from Columbia, where she had a restaurant that was targeted for extortion after years of persecution. As a result, she sent two of her children to the U.S. to live with relatives. Eventually the whole family came and was granted political asylum. -
Denis Guriev and Lana Gurieva came to the U.S. 10 years ago from Ukraine. They were young and relatively unattached. Today, they have a family and a business and they say they feel very much at home in the Miami Valley. -
In part three of The Bind that Ties, we hear two women who are such good friends, they call themselves twin sisters – even though Gabriela Pickett is from Mexico and Severa Mwiza is from Rwanda.
