Zovaira Rodriguez graduated from CSULA with a B.S. in criminal justice and a minor in anthropology. She has been a member of the American Cancer Society for 10 years. She believes that her work at the Institute will cause a ripple effect that will make the world a better place.

Born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, Renita Thomas Franklin earned a B.S. in communication and theater from Jackson State University. She moved to Los Angeles where she continued her education at The Fashion Institute of Design And Merchandising, earning her A.A. in Visual Merchandising and Marketing Communications. She is a member of the SAG and enjoys performing on stage and in film whenever opportunities and time permits.

Based in New York and Philadelphia, Jayne has served as Managing Director of Advancement for USC Shoah Foundation since 2012. Prior to joining USC, Jayne was President of The ARJAY Group and spent over 25 years as a special event, fundraising and volunteer management consultant. She is a graduate of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Crispin Brooks is the curator of the USC Shoah Foundation’s visual history archive. Educated in Russian studies at the University of Manchester and University College London’s School of Slavonic & East European Studies and an accredited translator of the British Institute of Linguists, he has published a book and articles on Russian avant-garde poetry and the Holocaust in Ukraine.

Publicist Rob Kuznia joined the communication department at USC Shoah Foundation in August 2014. Kuznia worked as a journalist for 15 years, most recently as an education reporter for the Daily Breeze newspaper in Los Angeles, where he won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for his series of stories uncovering corruption at Southern California school district.

Lesly Culp is an ELA National Board Certified teacher who holds both her B.A. in English, Language and Literature and her Master’s in Education, Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Southern California. She has been a high school English teacher for 18 years and has had an active role in designing curriculum and teacher professional development.  In September of 2014 Lesly Culp joined USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education team as Senior Content Specialist/Trainer.  In this role, Lesly delivers professional development and creates multimedia content for IWitness and other testimony-based educational resources, works closely with Echoes & Reflections partners, Facing History and Ourselves partners, U.S. Regional Consultants, and the Junior Intern Program – among other projects. 

Karen Kim is the senior researcher and evaluator for the USC Shoah Foundation. She was previously a faculty member at CSU Fullerton; education director for a National Science Foundation funded center at UCLA; researcher and evaluator of several large-scale, multi-institutional grant projects; and research administrator for the Directors Guild of America.  Dr. Kim earned her Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Claudia Ramirez Wiedeman is Director of Education at the USC Shoah Foundation. Dr. Wiedeman earned her PhD from UCLA in Education and with an emphasis in applied linguistics and her specialties include K-12 teacher education, biliteracy, instructional design, digital literacy and evaluation. Dr. Wiedeman oversees the Institute’s flagship educational website, IWitness, which makes audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide and mass atrocity accessible to educators and students worldwide. Dr. Wiedeman provides the strategic vision for all educational programs, leads the design, planning and implementation of the institute’s global education program and manages the department’s day to day operations. Dr. Wiedeman has written peer-reviewed articles on teacher development, social justice and the intersection of testimony, technology and culture.

Daryn Eller is responsible for archiving the Shoah Foundation’s institutional audiovisual records and helps provide archival research and writing for in-house video productions. Prior to joining the Foundation, Daryn was a magazine and book writer. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master’s of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University.

Inna Gogina has worked at USC Shoah Foundation in a variety of capacities since 1999, including assistant production coordinator, historical content analyst, coordinator of international programs, international digital education associate, and, currently, an archivist. Gogina holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classical philology from Moscow State University, a master’s degree in public administration from California State University, Northridge, and a MLIS degree from San José State University, with emphasis on information organization, digital services, and emerging technologies.