Sandra Aguilar oversees metadata, indexing, and institutional archiving. Prior to the Institute, Sandra worked as Director of Archives for USC School of Cinematic Arts' Warner Bros. and Moving Image Archives. Previously she worked as Media Librarian in the visual effects industry at Industrial Light & Magic. She received an M.L.I.S. from the UCLA and a B.A. in Film Studies from UC Santa Barbara.

After years of working with the USC Shoah Foundation and running the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, Hilary Helstein admits she still couldn’t make sense of the Holocaust. But through art, she found her way in – and so have audiences around the world who have watched her film As Seen Through These Eyes.

Aniko Friedberg describes how she would create sculptures out of clay while interned in the Allendorf forced labor camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald. She didn’t recall this memory until she reunited with former prisoners, who remembered her sculptures, decades later.

USC Shoah Foundation’s academic year programming kicks off next Monday with a screening of the documentary As Seen Through These Eyes, which tells the stories of Holocaust survivors who made art during and after World War II.

With nearly 52,000 interviews from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides, the archive of audio-visual testimony assembled and maintained by USC Shoah Foundation is so abundant it would take at least 12 years to watch it from beginning to end. And that’s assuming the footage would be rolling 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When I started my new job here at the Institute, I was struck by this statistic, which adequately conveys the scope of this incredible resource.