About Memoirize
Stories That Make Us
A story does not always announce itself while it is happening.
It looks like a family making its way through years no one thought to document. A graduate crossing a stage with generations of sacrifice behind them. A person finding the courage to begin again. A founder taking a chance on an idea. A leader discovering who they are beyond the title. An institution becoming something greater than anyone first imagined.
At the time, these moments simply feel like life.
Later, we understand: they are the stories that make us.
Memoirize was created to give those stories the attention, artistry, and permanence they deserve.
We connect individuals and institutions with professional oral historians and storytellers who bring meaningful experiences to life through audio and film.
Memoirize was founded by Reisha L. Raney, creator and host of Daughter Dialogues, an oral-history project featuring women of African American lineage whose ancestors contributed to the American Revolution.
Through Daughter Dialogues, Reisha saw how deeply people responded, not only to the history the women uncovered, but to the women themselves. Their choices. Their accomplishments. Their relationships. The turns their lives had taken and the meaning they made from them.
Then, for her 50th birthday, she had the audacity to rent a movie theater and play the story of her first fifty years on the big screen. She wanted to look back while she could still reflect, laugh, remember, and celebrate with the people who had helped shape the story. As a result, in combination with the impact of the stories of Daughter Dialogues, individuals, families, and institutions began asking Reisha to also help tell their stories.
Reisha created Memoirize to connect people and institutions with meaningful stories to the professional storytellers, oral historians, and filmmakers who know how to ask the right questions, listen closely, and bring those stories to life in archival quality formats to last generations far beyond technological changes, which compressed recordings produced by cell phones and video chat recordings are unable to withstand.
Reisha is a mathematician, mechanical engineer, entrepreneur, president of Encyde Corporation, ranked in the top 4% of women-owned businesses in the United States of America. She is also a non-resident fellow at the
W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute for African & African American Research at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center.
GET IN TOUCH
