Co-founder Heather Maio-Smith reflects on her memory of our dear Kia:
“It was through the USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony project that I got to know and work with Kia for over 10 years. For years we were partners in crime, working together to do something that had never been done before. She was a force of nature, solution oriented, curious, organizing and being organized was her superpower. Our program needed that, I needed that. She took all of my creative craziness, all my passion and emotion and focused it into something concrete, something real.
She continued to expand and kept innovating. She went on to produce another 30 Dimensions In Testimony Interviews, over 50 in total under her leadership. Building on the groundbreaking innovation that the project was known for, she managed the production of the award winning 360 Interactive VR film, The Last Goodbye, the first of its kind. She went on to produce several more VR projects over the course of her tenure with USC Shoah Foundation.
In November of 2021, Kia Hays came join us at StoryFile as our Senior Vice President of Studio and Content. We were growing and I desperately needed her superpowers, again. She built an amazing team, set up a new organizational structure for the studio and for producing conversational video AI content. She lifted up, advocated for, managed and mentored her team members and contractors along the way. She turned the studio into a much more efficient process driven entity, helped to organize the help center and the customer service process as well as all of the corporate training for our SAAS product Conversa. Under her leadership her department created and managed all of the tutorial content and our own storyfile for Conversa to help answer clients questions. She was a trusted thought partner, leader, fellow strategist, problem solver, mentor, advocate for her team as well as other staff members and worked tirelessly to help make StoryFile successful.
We will be eternally grateful for having her with us on this journey. We are heartbroken knowing the world will be a very different place without her in it. We have all been blessed to work alongside such a brilliant mind and have such a creative, compassionate, beautiful friend.
We will never forget her and keep doing the work she loved – to bring people’s stories to life – in her honor.“