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"Closing the Circle” Bringing the Diasporic Experience Back to the Homeland
Tuesday October 20, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EEST
Conference hall: Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania: Great Hall
This panel brings together three Chicago-based audiovisual archival projects representing three diasporic communities—the Not-So-Ordinary Polish American home movie collection, the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago, and the Lithuanian Archives Project—each representing distinct waves of migration to that city. Each organization engages audiovisual archives as active agents of transnational connection, circulating the diasporic experience back to the homeland.

All three projects reframe amateur audiovisual materials (home movies, radio broadcasts, oral histories) as primary historical sources for understanding migrant life and creating bridges between private memory and public history. Polish families exchanged videotapes and cameras between Chicago and Poland as a form of presence across absence. Filipino American home movies on 16mm film, now appraised as among the earliest surviving documentary records of this diasporic community, capture migrant leisure and mobility as acts of self-authorship. Lithuanian community recordings sustained cultural and political identity through the Cold War and into the post-Soviet era, linking diaspora nodes from Chicago to Argentina to Australia.

Panelists will discuss shared ethical and methodological considerations across all three projects, as well as their efforts to engage communities, both in Chicago and the homeland, with the materials.
Speakers
avatar for Audra V. Adomenas

Audra V. Adomenas

President, Lithuanian Archives Project
Audra Adomenas is an archivist and nonprofit leader based in Chicago. She is the founder and president of the Lithuanian Archives Project (LAP), established in 2009 and incorporated in 2012 as a not-for-profit organization in the State of Illinois, USA, dedicated to preserving, digitizing... Read More →
avatar for Ashley Dequilla

Ashley Dequilla

Artist-filmmaker and Archivist, University of Illinois Chicago
Ashley Dequilla is an artist-filmmaker and archivist specializing in Philippine ethnographic and diasporic collections based in Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MFA in Moving Image and is completing her MA in Art History from the University of Illinois Chicago. Her efforts in community... Read More →
avatar for Moriah Ulinskas

Moriah Ulinskas

Founding Member, CAW Collective
Moriah Ulinskas is a community archivist and public historian whose research examines histories of dispossession, focusing on how marginalized communities organized to resist displacement and how that history of resistance lies latent in archival collections today. She is a founding... Read More →
avatar for Agata Zborowska

Agata Zborowska

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral F, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven/University of Chicago/University of Warsaw
Agata Zborowska is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Chicago and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Her current research and archival project investigates home movies and related oral histories of Polish... Read More →
Tuesday October 20, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EEST
Conference hall: Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania: Great Hall
  Panel, In Person

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