Alexandra Zapruder began her career as a member of the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Smith College, she served on the curatorial team for the museum’s exhibition for young visitors, Remember The Children, Daniel’s Story. She earned her Ed.M. in Education at Harvard University in 1995.
In 2002, Alexandra completed her first book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, which was published by Yale University Press and won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. It has since been published in Dutch and Italian. She wrote and co-produced I’m Still Here, a documentary film for young audiences based on her book, which aired on MTV in May 2005 and was nominated for two Emmy awards. In the fall of 2015, she completed a second paperback edition and a multimedia edition of Salvaged Pages and, in conjunction with Facing History and Ourselves, published related educational materials designed for middle and high school teachers. She contributed an essay about young writers’ diaries to the Anne Frank House Permanent Catalogue, which was published in eight languages.
In November 2016, she published her second book, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which tells the story of her grandfather’s home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination. She curated a permanent exhibition titled And Still I Write: Young Diarists on War and Genocide which opened at Holocaust Museum Houston in 2019. In 2020, in partnership with EIHR, she launched a project called Dispatches from Quarantine which provided a platform for young people to document their real-time experiences of life during the Covid-19 Pandemic and published an online gallery showcasing their contributions in prose, poetry, photography, art, and song. In 2021-22, she ghostwrote a forthcoming memoir about a German-Jewish refugee family during the Holocaust and consulted on an online-exhibition at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on the diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski from the Vilna Ghetto.
Alexandra serves as the Education Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation. She also sits on the Board of Directors for the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights (EIHR), a nonprofit that develops partnerships with teachers in post-conflict countries to provide training in best practices on human rights, genocide prevention, and Holocaust education.
She has been published in Parade, LitHub, Smithsonian, and The New York Times.