When Pace is Home

Rachel Skopp-Cardillo ’20 (left) with her mother, Lauren Cardillo ’80, at an Emmy Awards ceremony.

When Rachel Skopp-Cardillo ’20 learned that she had been nominated for an Emmy Award for her work as associate producer on the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, only two years after graduation from Pace, she called two very important people in her life.

The first was her mother. The conversation felt a bit like déjà vu, because as a young girl, Skopp-Cardillo was once seated at a local Emmy Awards ceremony, holding the iconic statuette recently won by her mom, Lauren Cardillo ’80, Literature and Communications, a three-time Emmy Award–winning documentarian whose subjects included Olympic swimming hopefuls and races across the Sahara Desert. Back then, the elder Cardillo had been recognized for The Mother Road, about a Route 66 road trip she and her own mom, Irene Maruzzella Cardillo ’51, Chemistry, had taken together.

Rachel Skopp-Cardillo ’20 with her Emmy Award. (Photo by Nitara Ortiz ’19)

Skopp-Cardillo had always known that she wanted to work with the Olympics, and her ultimate win was well earned, the result of hard work and team effort. As part of her role at NBC Sports leading to the Emmy, she was deeply involved in the Highlights Factory, a large space occupied 24/7 by shot selectors, production assistants, editors, producers, and directors that published highlights, compilations, interviews, and inspiring stories on NBC’s YouTube channel and official website. With so much footage coming in, Skopp-Cardillo’s role was to help select the best and share it with the producers and editors. She also directed camera feeds of the swimming competition from Tokyo—a challenging task as there was permanence to her decisions.

Skopp-Cardillo’s talent was developed and supported by her studies as a Digital Cinema and Filmmaking student on the Pleasantville campus, which brings us to the second person she called after learning of her Emmy nomination: Professor Maria Luskay, EdD.

As part of her enrollment in Professor Luskay and Professor Lou Guarneri’s (MFA) Producing a Documentary class, a course that has garnered many accolades for its travel documentaries with an environmental or sustainability focus, Skopp-Cardillo learned technical skills and teamwork through the making of Puerto Rico: Hope in the Dark (2018) and Hawaii: Living on the Edge in Paradise? (2019). “Working on a PaceDocs documentary is one of the best ways to experience hands-on learning outside of the classroom at Pace,” she said. “With roles as first assistant director and colorist, I was able to thrive as a filmmaker and gain confidence in knowing that this is what I am supposed to be doing with my life.”

 “Working on a PaceDocs documentary is one of the best ways to experience hands-on learning outside of the classroom at Pace. With roles as first assistant director and colorist, I was able to thrive as a filmmaker and gain confidence in knowing that this is what I am supposed to be doing with my life.”

—Rachel Skopp-Cardillo ’20

The knowledge she gained in the course continues to assist Skopp-Cardillo in her current role at NBC Sports as a coordinator in the scheduling department, and her video editing classes with Professor Melanie La Rosa, MFA, helped familiarize her with the Avid Media Composer editing system that she also uses daily.

Experiential learning in the form of internships also served to foreshadow her success. She first worked as a post-production intern at Creative Chaos, assisting producers and editors with their footage needs, and second, as an engagement intern at American Documentary, assisting in developing educational materials for teachers and students in grades 8–12 on the Season 32 documentaries airing on PBS for POV. She was recommended for the latter, in fact, by both Luskay and Pace University President Marvin Krislov.

In addition to following in the footsteps of her Emmy Award–winning mother, Skopp-Cardillo also inherited the strength to overcome challenges and pursue her dreams.

As someone living with attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, and dysgraphia, a neurological disorder characterized by writing disabilities, Skopp-Cardillo sometimes finds it difficult to write things down and tell stories verbally. She instead feels she can shine more visually, which has been a contributing factor to her success. In fact, all aspects of production—pre-production, production, and post-production—always felt very natural to Skopp-Cardillo. She plans to continue to transform her conditions into strengths with the goal of working both the next Olympics and the Paralympics in Paris in 2024.

Says her mother, “Rachel is a very visual person, which lends itself perfectly to the medium. And she has the same energy and determination as her grandmother and I do.”

Lauren Cardillo ‘80 speaking at commencement.

Her grandmother, Irene Maruzzella Cardillo ’51, graduated from the then known-as Our Lady of Good Counsel College in White Plains with a degree in chemistry, a rare accomplishment in the 1940s for a woman, and even moreso for a daughter of an Italian-immigrant family that did not support the idea of a woman going to a co-ed college. Before transferring to Good Counsel, her will for an education and defiance of the norms at that time would manifest in sneaking out of her home to go to class.

Her discovery by her father, however, resulted in a compromise and perfect twist of fate: Good Counsel was an allwomen’s college administered by nuns. And so the stage for intergenerational success was set.

Decades later, on the Pleasantville campus, her daughter Lauren had been first introduced to the world of video by Professor Emeritus Robert Klaeger, MA, and became editor-in-chief of the thencampus newspaper, New Morning. The latter experience opened many doors and taught her about hard work and pulling all-nighters, which, in addition to her coursework, she describes as “fabulous training” for her Emmy-winning career.

When it was time for her own daughter to select a college, Lauren Cardillo, who notably was also a commencement speaker at her own Pace graduation before continuing with graduate studies at Stanford University, had little doubt that the matrilineal winds of continuing Opportunitas—the Pace mission—would change. She recounts the moment she and Rachel visited the campus together for the first time: a cold and windy day, but her daughter was all smiles as soon as they exited the car.

In Skopp-Cardillo’s own words, “It felt like home.” In her mom’s, “Rachel absolutely got what she needed out of Pace, and I could not be happier.”