OUR LEADERSHIP

Founder and Executive Director

Marcella Adamski, Ph.D.

Marcella Adamski, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a practice in San Francisco, California, United States, who has worked for more than 30 years with various international humanitarian and human rights organizations. She served as Director of Survivors International, an organization dedicated to the treatment of survivors of political torture from around the world. She has conducted therapy groups for the International Rescue Committee with traumatized refugees from Bosnia. She has also served as a board member of the Tibet Justice Center (formerly International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet). As a consulting psychologist, Dr. Adamski participated in two Tibet Justice Center investigations in Dharamsala, India, conducting interviews with Tibetan women and children refugees about conditions in Chinese-occupied Tibet. When she met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama during this mission, he urged that the elders of Tibet be interviewed next to insure that their stories be recorded for generations to come. In response she founded the Tibet Oral History Project in 2003 and serves as its Executive Director.

 

Outreach Director, Interpreter and Translator

Tenzin Yangchen

Tenzin Yangchen is a Tibetan who was born in India and lives in a refugee community in Bylakuppe, India. She speaks Tibetan, English, Hindi and Kannada. She completed all her education in the English language. She is fluent in the three major dialects of the Tibet provinces as a result of the mixed backgrounds of her community’s residents. Tenzin Yangchen serves as Managing Trustee of the Gesar Charity Foundation and as International Service Director of Rotary Lhasa in Bylakuppe. She is the Outreach Director for the Tibet Oral History Project—she pre-interviewed the Tibetan elders and coordinated all interviews in India and Nepal. She also serves as an interpreter and she translated and transcribed all the interviews in the collection.