USC Shoah Foundation Institute - The Institute for Visual History and Education

Inspired by the making of Schindler’s List, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation was founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994. A non-profit organisation, its initial mission was to videotape the testimonies of Shoah survivors and witnesses for educational purposes. Between 1994 and 1999, the first 50,000 interviews were conducted. For this purpose, 36 regional offices were established in the first decade. The organisation was renamed USC Shoah Foundation Institute - The Institute for Visual History and Education and found a permanent home at the University of Southern California in 2006. Its principal mission since 2001 is “to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry — and the suffering they cause — through the educational use of the Foundation's Visual History Archive”. Today, the foundation employs 60 people worldwide. Since 2008, the foundation has embarked upon an ambitious project to digitise its aging master tapes, so its collection can be preserved for future generations. More recently, the foundation has supported initiatives to document the genocides in Cambodia, Armenia, China (the Nanjing massacre) and Rwanda. Dozens of interviews with Rwandan survivors are already incorporated in its collections.