Watch our video about the Institute's history and its current mission at the University of Southern California.
Learn more about the USC Shoah Foundation and its 30-year history.
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New Dimensions in Testimony is a multidisciplinary tech project that lets users converse in dialogue with Holocaust survivors.
Pinchas Gutter goes out of his way to find me biscuits. In a sun-baked living room in his north London home, he opens a packet of Rich Tea, sits down and tells me about the Holocaust. Gutter was seven years old when the second world war broke out. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto for three and a half years, took part in its uprising, survived six Nazi concentration camps – including the Majdanek extermination camp – and lived through a death march across Germany to Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia.
Experiencing the brand-new “Alternate Realities” programme at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest—the UK’s largest documentary film festival—was dizzying and diverse. Following on from Sundance and Cannes, which have recently made their first serious forays into virtual reality, Doc/Fest curators put 12 major VR and other interactive projects into their programme this year.
Twenty-three years since Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, he hasn’t stopped collecting testimonies of firsthand accounts from Holocaust survivors.
Today, these stories and more, totaling 53,000 tales of horror and survival, have been documented and archived at the USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, which Spielberg founded, housed at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
In the 1990s, the USC Shoah Foundation conducted video interviews with thousands of Holocaust survivors, so that their stories are never forgotten. The nonprofit's digital library currently houses 53,000 video testimonies, and in recent years has expanded to capture testimony from those who witnessed the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, and the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I.
The USC Shoah Foundation announced Wednesday it is broadening access to its archive of genocide testimony by partnering with a technology company that connects researchers at universities, libraries, schools and organizations around the world. Starting immediately, ProQuest will become the exclusive distributor of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education’s Visual History Archive to colleges and universities around the world, except in China, according to foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith.