“Voices through Canvas” is an art series that emerged from an earlier testimonial project called “Stories for All Ages” (SFAA), which connected GenZ interviewers with Holocaust survivors living in New York City.

The idea for SFAA came in ninth grade, after I attended a meeting with my school’s Jewish affinity group (JiNY) in which we discussed how to better educate GenZers about antisemitism. Recognizing how limited our school curriculum was, my friend Sydney and I felt the need to start SFFA with a mission to promote communal healing: by preserving Holocaust survivors' stories, by developing educational curricula, and by creating platforms for sharing these narratives.

But as moving, profound, and extraordinarily complex as these survivor stories were, I felt that unfortunately we were not able to engage as many people as I had hoped. Perhaps it was the natural human desire to avoid emotionally traumatizing stories or the length of the written narratives in a world increasingly dominated by TikTok attention spans.

I felt we needed other ways of capturing, preserving, and communicating their experiences. So I turned to making my own visual art based upon these interviews.

In doing so, I was able to garner more interest in their stories: people who saw the paintings were drawn in and asked me about the underlying events, as well as why I depicted certain aspects of the survivors’ accounts. And the more I painted, the more I personally identified with their stories. My Jewish identity deeply connects me to Holocaust experiences, and as I visualized and portrayed the harrowing events of these survivor accounts, I felt as though I was bridging time in some small way—and adding an accurate viscerality to their spoken narratives.

In the time since I’ve painted the works below, I’ve begun a new online multimedia project as well: “Visions and Voices of Trauma” (VVT) a lecture series in which I interview other artists whose work has similarly sought to memorialize mass trauma events. Currently, I am scheduled to interview Mirta Kupferminc, Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak, Mher Khachatryan, Andy Farr, Terry Sullivan, and the artists behind “Nobody’s Listening.”

As part of this larger VVT project, I am also continuing to create new works, drawing on the wide range of techniques that these other artists use to capture the often-unseeable nature of severe trauma. Throughout all my work, I hope to honor the survivors' stories and underscore the capacity of art to shape our collective memory and societal understanding. These projects are about more than just preserving history; they’re about leveraging art to ignite social change, foster empathy, and connect us to our shared humanity.