By Kayden Breedlove
From being a female athlete herself to promoting those like her today, alumna and M-Club member Andrea Buccilla (BA 10, MA 12) is establishing herself as a strong storyteller in the film and advertising industry, though her path has been anything but linear.
A former middle school English teacher and journalism major, Buccilla seeks to make more than just projects that tell a story. She wants to ensure that those stories connect to her audiences on a sincerely human level.
Growing up playing golf in Dublin, Ohio, Ole Miss was never really on her radar, but ended up being one of several schools that Buccilla was recruited by coming out of high school.
“I had visits to other schools scheduled, but on the calendar, it just worked out for me to visit Oxford first,” Buccilla said. “I came in fairly blind, on a non-football weekend in the fall. And while I love an Ole Miss football weekend now, I think it was fortuitous that I got to experience Oxford for the first time when it was a little more chill.”
Buccilla fell in love with Ole Miss that weekend and canceled the rest of her scheduled university visits.
“The other coaches were like, ‘You know, we wish this was the first time we had someone cancel on us after a visit to Ole Miss,’” she laughed.
A member of the Ole Miss women’s golf team (2006-09), Buccilla enrolled as a business major but quickly realized that path was not for her. Instead, she turned her sights to the School of Journalism and New Media and quickly realized the passion she had for the profession. It was the right choice from the jump, she said after noticing how much she enjoyed the courses offered to her.
“It got to the point where I kind of had my credits knocked out by [fall semester of] my senior [year], and I just signed up for every elective that I could,” Buccilla said. “I particularly enjoyed design and photography courses, so I guess if you look back, there were signs that I was going to go into visual storytelling.”
In spring 2010, with graduation looming and a recession-plagued job market looking dire, Buccilla started exploring her options. She decided to apply to Mississippi Teacher Corps (MTC), an alternate-route graduate program that trains non-education majors to be teachers in critical-needs districts around the state. She decided that, if accepted, she’d pursue teaching as a career.
“I always had great relationships with my own teachers, and obviously, you know, I was only four years removed from my high school teachers at that point,” she said. “I’d kept in touch with them all during college, coaches as well, and I just thought: that’s a great life, it’s purposeful work.”
Buccilla secured a position as a seventh-grade English teacher in Byhalia, but after completing her two years there and earning her master’s degree, she felt pulled to be closer to home and family. While the South will always hold a place in her heart, she decided to pursue her life-long dream of living in New York City.
After spending the next seven years dedicating her time and building community with students and families in Brooklyn, Buccilla again felt the pull to follow a dream.
She continued to write while she was a teacher, primarily via a blog that was a requirement of MTC.
“I kind of found my writing voice then, actually, more than I found it as a journalism student, which made me realize that I was more of a storyteller than a hard news reporter,” she said. “My husband, who was a screenwriting major and an executive producer in advertising, started pestering me about writing scripts and making indie films with him. Eventually, I gave in and wrote my first screenplay, and it did fairly well on the festival circuit.”
As their interest in creating content flourished, both Buccilla and her husband decided to continue leaning into their new side-hustle.
“We started our own production company in 2018 while I still worked at the school, and we were doing some branded content, some paid gigs, and I was like, oh man, I love this,” Buccilla recalled. “Let me see if I can convince someone to give me a job in advertising.”
It was a scary leap. Buccilla, who was 30 at the time, had had a wonderful 10-year career in education and was pregnant with her daughter. “Not exactly the ideal time to make a completely wild career shift,” she said.
But after a few months of expanding her network and applying to various positions, she eventually landed a position as a creative producer at Brooklyn-based Madwell, an indie, integrated agency.
“I was wholly unqualified for that job,” she said. “But I built relationships and they took a risk on me. That job changed my life.”
At Madwell she produced a few smaller video shoots, but mostly large-scale photography campaigns.
“By doing mostly photography I realized that that’s what my husband and I did on the side – was what I was really passionate about,” Buccilla said. “So as much as I loved it there, I knew I had to make another scary leap.”
It was then that Buccilla applied to be a Creative Producer at MALKA Media, where she’s been ever since. During her first year there, she began throwing her name in the ring for directing opportunities. Her projects started small but have since grown in scale, and she’s now directed commercials and branded documentaries for Amazon, KPMG, The Washington Post, Budweiser and more. But most notably, she just released her first feature-length documentary Shattered Glass: A WNBPA Story.
“That project was a dream come true. To think that five years ago I was working in a school in Brooklyn, and now I’ve gotten to direct a feature film about women athletes. It’s just wild. I’ve finally found my calling.”
Buccilla said that, while her career paths weren’t linear, the confidence she gained by engaging with her work and building authentic relationships with people in the industry significantly helped with the transition from teaching to film and directing.
“I got a job in this industry, a highly competitive industry, because I built relationships with people… really meaningful human relationships,” Buccilla said. “I mean, the reason I was able to make Shattered Glass…was really born out of relationships and trust.”
She has plans for more sports-centric documentaries, but she also wants to explore more opportunities in Mississippi, the place that in many ways formed who she is.
“Mississippi and Ole Miss have so many rich stories. I want to be the one to tell them.”
