Stephen D. Smith
Co-Founder and Chief Executive, Lumenairi
Stephen D. Smith has spent his working life on a single problem: how a person’s account of their own life survives them, and who gets to decide whether it does.
For twelve years he served as Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation, the archive founded by Steven Spielberg to record the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust and of genocides worldwide, and one of the largest collections of first-person video testimony in existence. He is Executive Director Emeritus of the Foundation and has held the UNESCO Chair on Genocide Education. He has conducted interviews with people at the edges of human experience — Holocaust survivors, witnesses to genocide, veterans, civil rights leaders — and with people whose lives contained no headline events at all, which taught him something he had not expected about whose stories turn out to matter.
His work on preserving testimony has taken institutional form as well as archival. He co-founded the UK’s National Holocaust Centre and the Aegis Trust, and was project director for the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda.
He is a co-founder of StoryFile, where interactive video testimony was first built as a commercial platform, and a co-founder of Lumenairi, which builds conversational video infrastructure: recordings a viewer can question years later and receive the answer the person actually gave, in their own voice and face. Nothing is generated.
He is also a co-founder of Our Jewish Story, a community oral history initiative built in partnership with the National Library of Israel, gathering the testimony of Jewish communities worldwide into a permanent home.
Books
- Holocaust XR: Immersive Technologies as the Last Act of Testimony (Routledge, 2026)
- The Trajectory of Holocaust Memory: The Crisis of Testimony in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2023)
- The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide (Routledge, 2021, co-edited with Sara E. Brown)
- The Holocaust and the Christian World (co-edited) [CONFIRM edition year — 2000, 2019 and 2020 all appear in circulation]
- Never Again, Yet Again: A Personal Struggle with the Holocaust and Genocide (2009)
- The Story of You: Human Heritage in the Age of AI (forthcoming)
Immersive and documentary work
He has produced immersive and documentary projects exploring how testimony is encountered rather than only recorded, including Tell Me, Inge…, a virtual reality experience made in association with Meta; The Last Goodbye, an award-winning VR film shot inside the Majdanek camp; and The Girl and The Picture, an award-winning documentary following a survivor of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. He was a producer on Dimensions in Testimony, the interactive testimony project through which conversational video first reached museum audiences.
Writing
He writes about human heritage in the age of artificial intelligence — why the record we keep of ourselves is overwhelmingly a record of what we produced rather than who we were, what authenticity means when a convincing fake costs nothing, and what an archive has to do to deserve the trust of the people who contribute to it.