Josh Parisi, a junior studying cinema and screen studies, is a student that is anything but ordinary. He is a student cinematographer particularly skilled in lighting and framing films, who has worked on many notable films already in his young career. Parisi helps to tell the tale of how riches and success come with a price in the TV series Spectral Transmission. He was also instrumental in the creation of the first place prize-winning film, winner of audience choice and best performance at the Oswego Panic Film festival, The Eighth Night; a story of what happens to a young woman when she has a close encounter with her mother-in-law and “something else” on the eighth night of Hanukkah. Parisi is presently working on the movie and interdepartmental project, Xeniathan! Destroyer of Worlds, a musical story about a woman’s quest to end the world.
When Parisi is not making films, he can be found working with a group of his close friends at the Hewitt Kitchen, where he’s worked for a year and a half. It is rare to see Parisi on campus without his family of great friends.
He has been a steadfast vegetarian for a year now and is in a loving relationship with his long-term girlfriend, Ashley.
With his love for movies, it is no surprise then that Parisi is the man behind the popular SUNY Oswego-based meme on Twitter that references the hilarious 2004 film Mean Girls.
So, why is the meme a “thing?”
“When I came in as a freshman in fall 2012, it was called the Campus Center,” Parisi says. “That’s what I learned it as and it’s very irritating when they just change it. The new people on campus now know it as Marano Center because they’re new and act like they know more about the campus then students who have been here longer.”
Parisi is loved by the people who know him and his friends never seem to run out of great things to say about him.