Celia Aniskovich was in a summer acting program in which the teacher asked the students to raise their hands if they wanted to be actors. About 10 hands shot up. Some lagged behind. 

“If your hand wasn’t one of the ones that shot straight up,” the teacher said, “pick any other job because this one is too hard.” Ms. Aniskovich’s hand did not shoot straight up, and she probably should have taken the hint, she said, laughing, as she relayed the story to Loomis Chaffee students gathered on Monday, April 28, for a dinner event hosted by Writing Initiatives.

But she was a high school kid, and acting is the career she thought she wanted. “I did all the school plays,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to do.” As she prepared to apply for college, she asked her theater teacher for a recommendation, but he didn’t think he could write one that could help. She was devastated. She applied to many colleges and ended up going to Fordham University in the Bronx. It was “the best thing that could have happened to me,” she reflected.  

By her sophomore year at Fordham, she knew she wanted to work in live TV, and she reached that goal, with her career beginning in broadcast news as an NBC page before she transitioned to narrative and documentary filmmaking.   

The girl whose hand did not shoot straight up now has a career that has taken off. She has directed, produced, developed, and consulted on numerous projects, and her films have been seen around the world. She is the founder of Dial Tone Films and this year launched a digital magazine, Switchboard, which produces long-form nonfiction pieces that one day might end up as a TV or film project or produced in other formats. 

Ms. Aniskovich is on campus all week. On Wednesday night, she is giving a Chapel Talk, and on Friday her short film, Taking Back the Groove, will be screened, followed by a question-and-answer session and a candy reception. The Center for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and PRISM teamed up for these events. Ms. Aniskovich also visited freshman English classes on Wednesday.  

Friday’s candy reception is a tribute to Ms. Aniskovich, said Courtney Jackson, who was an adviser to Ms. Aniskovich at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire when Courtney was a teacher there and Ms. Aniskovich a student. Courtney, an English teacher and director of gender & sexuality at Loomis Chaffee, introduced Courtney on Monday night. She said everyone at St. Paul’s knew where to find some candy when needed — in Ms. Aniskovich’s room. 

There may be sweet spots to aspects of Ms. Aniskovich’s work, but as a documentarian, she said, she often is talking to people about the worst days of their lives.   

Hers is a tough job. “I wax poetic about it,” she said, “because I love it, and I also know you could pay me $10 million to sit at a desk and I’d fall asleep every day. That just doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning.” 

But these types of stories do: a six-part podcast, Spy Affair, based on the story of alleged Russian spy Maria Butina; Taking Back the Groove, a documentary about Bronx-born disco legend Richie Weeks and his fight to reclaim his music catalogue; Burn It Down, a documentary about the attempt to replicate the Woodstock vibe 30 years later; and There’s No Winning in Murder, the documentary of a Connecticut woman who lost two of her daughters and a granddaughter to domestic violence. 

The list of her documentary films is long and varied. Sometimes, Ms. Aniskovich said, she tells people she has done documentaries about everything from serial killers to Beanie Babies. Indeed, she looked at the frenzy and greed surrounding Beanie Babies in Beanie Mania in 2021.   

“I’m always looking for a strong character story ... a really interesting person,” she said. “If the people themselves cannot tell the story in an incredible way, I think that might make a great news story but not a documentary. And then sometimes you meet people who just jump off the screen.” 

Such was the case for a documentary “about Christmas tree salesmen in New York City. Basically, and most people don’t know this, all the trees sold in the five boroughs are sold by one of five people.” She laughed. “It’s a benevolent mafia situation, and they are just the salt of the earth, best people you’ve ever met but who have lived fascinating and complicated lives. And when I met them, I said, ‘This is not really about Christmas trees. This is about them.’” 

The Merchants of Joy, which is what the five call themselves, will be out for the Christmas season this year. 

“A lot of my work — while it covers a lot of different topics — if you look at them, they all tend to cover something that was lost and forgotten in history or a story where you say, ‘I know what that is about,’ but then you watch it and you say, ‘Oh God, I didn’t know what that was about at all.’” 

Part of Ms. Aniskovich’s job is to make her audience feel — anger, delight, hate, whatever. And maybe make viewers uncomfortable. Push the boundaries. Make you think. If so, then she knows she has done her job.   

She studied philosophy and theology in college, “which is not at all what I do, but sort of what I do. I found my way there.” To telling stories. 

“To see her now,” Courtney told the students, “so committed to storytelling and really on the map in the film industry, it’s exactly what should have happened.”