Andrew DiCristina ’14: From Acton, MA, to Anchorage, AK
Who knows how many commencement speeches advise graduates to step boldly into the world and seize the adventure that awaits them? And some grads, such as Andrew DiCristina ’14, do just that. “In my senior year at Keene, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do in the immediate future, but I wanted to get out of New England and do something new,” the Acton, Mass., native remembered. His good friend and fellow Film student Devin Cutter had landed a job as a photojournalist in Alaska, and the two decided to move to Anchorage together.
Shortly after Cutter was hired at ABC/Fox Alaska News, another photojournalist position opened up at the station. “Devin put in a good word for me before my interview, and I was hired!” DiCristina said. “It’s honestly been a whirlwind ever since. The news environment is very fast paced and gives me the opportunity to see and experience something new every single day.”
Fortunately, he was well prepared. “As a dual major in Film Production and English Writing, I learned a lot of technical skills, and I developed my creative thinking and problem solving, which play into my work every day,” DiCristina said. “My Production III/IV class with Ted White, during which I wrote and directed our film Annex, helped prepare me for the various planning, networking, technical skills, and creative-problem solving that I would come to need as a photojournalist in Alaska. My background in writing also proves to be an asset here—the reporters and on-air talent frequently ask for my input and advice when writing their news stories and scripts. While I never specifically trained for a background in broadcasting or journalism, there are a lot of little things that I had picked up over my years at Keene that I continually find myself drawing upon. You never know when a similar problem that you had on a student film set, or with a class assignment, will resurface months or years later in the workplace, and my undergraduate work certainly helped prepare me for that.”
So far, DiCristina’s favorite assignment is the video he shot and edited on the Seavey family, the legendary dog mushers who were in on the founding of the Iditarod dog-sled race and contributed some of its champions. Here’s a three-part series he did on them:
And here’s “a personal edit that I produced afterwards, because I wasn’t quite ready to let go of the footage and say goodbye.”
