Casey Nepivoda
Casey Nepivoda has lived a nomadic life, having lived in Virginia, Nebraska, Florida, Illinois, California, Hawaii, and now New York. Part of that was moving around for any various reasons, such as 9/11 or Nebraska gets boring after a while. The latter half is due to having joined the Navy. Casey is now an emerging filmmaker studying media production and journalism at New York City’s Marymount Manhattan College.
Casey cares about media that teach people about themselves and everyone else. Stories that ask one to look to themselves. His experience as a Mandarin-Chinese linguist for the Navy developed a fascination of language and why people use the specific words that they do.
Casey will be graduating from Marymount Manhattan College after the 2023 spring semester. Afterwards he will be looking to restart his professional career, albeit on a different path than his previous government experience
Artist Statement
Born to a single, working mother, taking care of two other older boys, and an always present father with an older boy of his own, I came into the family as the baby by eight years. This meant my parents were already tired of dealing with the other crazy kids, and, as long as I wasn’t getting my head knocked off, I could try out a lot of things. They also shared a bunch of different kinds of media with me.
Movie ratings didn’t matter. It was Howard Stern on the radio in the morning and David Letterman on TV at night. “Hey, have you seen Richard Pryor before?” I can’t imagine a better way to grow up.
I’d say my first inclination of wanting to make things came from watching late-night talk shows. Conan O’Brien was my favorite. I wanted to have my own show someday. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t that guy, but I knew there were other ways to affect people through screen productions. Another major influence in my wanting to create was my time in the Navy as a Mandarin- Chinese linguist. Language and why we say or don’t say what we do became extremely important to me. I was also a kid who took an interest in Buddhism and the basic message of just being decent.
All of these things, comedy, feeling, work, a single mother, a loving father, meeting people all over, relationships. This has made me understand how beautiful (or terrible!) real life is, and how you really don’t need to look too hard to find an interesting story to tell.