About Me

Ariel Schudson is a writer, an independent scholar, an archival activist and a media archivist, preferred pronouns are she/her/hers. She is a Los Angeles native (born and raised in Hollywood) and graduated from the LA County High School of the Arts after which she left for Santa Cruz, CA. She went to Cabrillo Junior College, transferred to UC Santa Cruz, spent a year at University of Kent at Canterbury in England and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in film, television and digital media. She went on to earn two more Master of the Arts degrees at UCLA- one in the film, television and digital media program in 2005 and the final one in Moving Image Archive Studies in 2013.

Ariel has completed archiving and cataloging work for the UCLA Film and Television Archive, worked closely with the Film Noir Foundation and TCM Film Fest, and is the podcastress and founder of Archivists Alley, a podcast created to examine and platform social issues and marginalized voices in the preservation, archiving and media-making landscape.

She identifies as an intersectional feminist and a cultural preservationist, and has been a vocal and dedicated part of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) for almost 10 years. Her views on issues of race, feminism and labor in the archival community can be found in various community discussions and she will always tell you the truth when asked.  Above all, her love for the community and passion for What We Do and What We Can Accomplish in the archival and preservation universe is omnipresent.

She has worked on the preservation of high-end celebrity legacy collections, 16mm television commercial projects, database design and various film history projects. She is a regular contributor to cinema history and pop culture-based blogs like Dangerous Minds and the New Beverly Cinema  and is currently working on a book-length project examining gender-representation in international television programs.