Alum
Lisa Levey
Freelance executive producer
Lisa Levey, BA'02, freelance executive producer with Bravo, TLC, Showtime, and Lifetime
“My sophomore year I took Intro to Production, and – I don't want to age myself – but we learned to edit on iMovie. And it was over for me. I thought, ‘This is it, I love doing this.’
Then I became a dork of all dorks, and I was crazy involved. I got a job at WTIU immediately, and then I ended up having about eight jobs there because I just wanted to soak everything up. There was kind of like this posse of super nerds with me. We would come in on the weekends and try to use gear and do stuff for fun – whatever we could because the department was so small then.
I just loved the creative process of it. When I graduated, I told one of my colleagues at WTIU, Jay Kincaid, ‘I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know where to go.' He had done some studio directing for the NBA and for the Olympics, and he said, 'If you go to New York, I can probably give you a couple names of people to talk to you.'
So I said, ‘Okay!’ and moved to New York.
There's a community of people wherever you go: New York, LA, Chicago, Indiana. You're going to have colleagues that are just like you. It's a clean slate. Sometimes, I think it’s like summer camp.
I made a new community in New York, and we were all broke. We were all doing little jobs. Then we just all evolved. We all were looking out for each other. The same community you can have here, you can have anywhere.
No matter where you're working – whether it's Bravo, Netflix, Roku, HBO – we all are sort of working under the same parameters. It doesn't really matter what company you're working for. As long as you have the skills to do your job, you can go anywhere. That's why I've been fortunate.”
Written By Kayla Pallotto
Photos By Giselle Marsteller