Features

Ever since its debut 50 years ago, as of this October, Saturday Night Live (1975 – ), the late-night sketch comedy show filmed live before a studio audience at NBC headquarters in 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, has been one of the most influential forces in American culture. From its earliest days, SNL has minted dozens of stars and innumerable viral moments, clips, and catchphrases. And, particularly in the past quarter-century, the show has employed its fair share of SVA alumni, whether as editors, post-production experts, set decorators, interns, photographers, or even one of its most beloved and longest-tenured cast members. 

For Fred Armisen (1987 Film and Video), the road from SVA to SNL was particularly nonlinear. Armisen came to the College in the late 1980s from Long Island, where he grew up dreaming of being a musician like his hardcore punk heroes. Art school seemed like a good place to meet kindred spirits, he says. 

“I wanted to go to an arts school because all my favorite bands met at art school. I majored in film and really wanted to be like John Waters. . . . So, it was a mix of wanting to be like Talking Heads and John Waters.”

Armisen met Damon Locks (1988 Fine Arts) in an art history class, and eventually followed his friend to the Art Institute of Chicago to keep the band they’d started together. Chicago led him to Los Angeles, where he began doing sketch comedy and fortuitously met Bob Odenkirk, who was a writer at SNL at the time, leading to an audition that would make New York City his home again for the first time since attending SVA. 

“It was great to return to the city and do it from a different angle—from art student to working comedian was a big difference,” he says, although the city had changed, too, and many of his favorite clubs, like the storied Danceteria and the Peppermint Lounge, had closed. He went on to star in the show from 2002 through 2013, creating memorable characters and impressions, including unruly houseguest Regine, talk show host Lawrence Welk, Garth (half a duo with Kristen Wiig’s Kat), Venezuelan nightclub act Fericito, and even Ian Rubbish, a silly sendup of some of his favorite punk musicians.

“I have always loved SNL and I’m just amazed that I got to do it,” he says. “Every time I go back, it feels exciting and electric, and it just seems like there’s plenty more to go.”

Matt Yonks (BFA 2001 Film and Video), now SNL’s post-production supervisor, has worked for the show for over 25 years—he remembers Armisen’s audition. Yonks started his own SNL career in the late 1990s with an internship in the talent department he found through SVA Career Development, which led to another in show creator Lorne Michaels’s office, organizing and digitizing the archives as the show inched toward a new age of technology. Also having paid his dues as a page for Late Night with Conan O’Brien (1993 – 2009), which was produced just a few floors away, Yonks quickly familiarized himself with the NBC microcosm and especially with SNL’s history.  

“I was prepping for the 25th anniversary and pulling all these old scripts and memos and letters, and the phone calls that would come through that office,” he says. “I just learned so much about everything. What works at the show and who to learn from, who the department heads are and how to be able to work for them when they need somebody.” 

Yonks was an older student at SVA, having matriculated from the College’s Continuing Education program, but distinctly remembers the excitement of being a film student, having a camera placed in his hands and sent to the streets to shoot. “SVA was very good about learning and getting your hands dirty,” he says. “From the start, you’re working, solving problems, and learning to adapt in real time. This hands-on approach directly prepared me for the fast-paced environment at SNL, where each week brings a new set of challenges. Every episode is different, and you have to think on your feet and move quickly. SVA’s immersive style was the perfect training.”

Today, Yonks works with a staff of about 30 audio mixers, color graders, VFX artists, editors and assistant editors, and other on-set and office workers for each week’s multiple pre-taped segments and interstitials. He has earned five Emmy nominations and one win in 2019 for his work on behind-the-scenes documentary shorts for the show. He was there at the dawn of SNL’s digital “shorts,” pulling long hours on set and in post-production with The Lonely Island—the writing and performing team of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer, known for early aughts classics like “Lazy Sunday” and “I’m on a Boat”—and their successors Good Neighbor, comprising Beck Bennett, Kyle Mooney, Nick Rutherford, and Dave McCary. And he was there when the show’s post-production team was making their first foray into software like Final Cut. In true early 2000s fashion, Yonks found someone on Craigslist to pull an all-nighter and teach him the program after he’d boldly volunteered himself to try editing with it the day before. 

“A lot of things have to go wrong sometimes for things to go right, and there are a lot of steps backwards and diagonal that bring you back to where you once were. I happened to be just in that right place at that right time,” he says. “I think I set a record number of detentions in high school for cutting class to watch SNL reruns on Comedy Central, and my principal told me that I would never get a job cutting classes to watch SNL. And that’s literally my job, watching SNL from all different angles.”

Yonks has shepherded a handful of fellow SVA alumni through the doors of 30 Rock, including current editing room assistant Jonathan Lamonte (BFA 2016 Film) and Yonks’s former SVA roommate Yanni Feder (BFA 2002 Film and Video), now a longtime editor at SNL who also found himself at the uniquely specific analog and digital crossroads. 

Like Yonks, Feder also carved out a niche as someone who was capable of handling the newest software and converting the show’s catalog of episodes from tape into slightly abbreviated digital versions for syndication. He began his SVA–to–SNL journey while still a student, as a production assistant in the film unit responsible for the show’s pre-taped pieces, and wound his way through numerous roles to finally land in the editing bay. Before SNL was equipped to bring all their post-production in-house and before Feder began his stint editing the live shows, he worked at Crew Cuts, a now-shuttered post-production house, just a few blocks south of Rockefeller Center alongside another SVA alumnus, the late Alex Serpico (BFA 2002 Film and Video), who also handled editing jobs for the show. And One Route, the creative-services company Feder co-founded in 2006, provided production support to SNL for many years. 

“I don't know if this is maybe just being at SNL, but a lot of it's just like, ‘We think you can do it. We're going to throw you in the fire and you better swim the first time’ kind of thing,” Feder says. “I think a lot of the hands-on experience I had at SVA, just literally being able to work with the cameras in class, and also working in the industry while you’re there, kind of prepared me, so when I got there I was ready to go in full-on.” 

Even a casual SNL viewer is familiar with the portraits of each week’s guest host and featured musical act used to segue between the show and its commercial breaks, and since 1999 have been the work of head photographer Mary Ellen Matthews. Several BFA Photography alumni—including Enid Alvarez (2002), Monica Palombo (2011), and Signe Pierce (2011)—have logged time as interns on Matthews’s team, and Chris Polinsky (2001) spent three seasons on the staff, working on everything from lighting to printing, scanning, and (naturally) photography. 

“Being on set and witnessing the creative process firsthand felt surreal—like being a part of history every week,” Polinsky says. Working on the guest portraits meant brushes with a dizzying range of notables like Jay-Z, Derek Jeter, Paul McCartney, Pedro Pascal, Seth Rogen, and Betty White. Even other stars were dazzled. Among Polinsky’s backstage photos is a 2002 snapshot of Conan O’Brien with the White Stripes; the SNL writer–turned–talk-show host stopped by the studio as a fan of the band. 

Set decorator Carol Silverman (MFA 2020 Visual Narrative) found her way to SVA while already in the midst of a successful career that includes work on shows like Boardwalk Empire (2010 – 14), And Just Like That (2021 – ), and, overlapping with her time at the College, SNL. Silverman worked on the show from 2017 through 2021, moonlighting as a graduate student in the latter half of that time. MFA Visual Narrative’s summer semester schedule fit perfectly with SNL’s hiatuses and, like Yonks, she used her SVA connection to recruit talent for the show, bringing on her classmate Michael Sheinkopf (MFA 2020 Visual Narrative) as a production assistant. 

At SNL, Silverman was mainly responsible for set-decorating pre-taped segments—spoofs of shows like Chopped (2009 – ) and Love Island (2015 – ), and the 2017 R&B music video parody “Come Back, Barack.” Her last years on the show were defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, when she had a front-row seat to some major changes.

“When I started, our office was on the same floor as the writers’ office,” she says. “They were just across on the other side of the elevator banks, and the halls were lined with stills and portraits of all the cast members from the beginning.” Eventually, the production operation moved to a Brooklyn warehouse to allow for more space and safe distancing. 

Whether their experience can be measured in semesters or decades, every SVA alumnus who logged time on SNL is a part of its history, contributing to everything from the way the show looks to how it runs. “It’s super fun to work with so many others who have also gone to SVA,” Yonks says. “I have such a deep admiration for the show and everyone who helps bring it to life. Working at SNL has truly been the experience of a lifetime.”

“It was just fun meeting all the other—I suppose I would call them ‘weirdos’—from high schools around the country, and that we were all in this one place. It felt like destiny. I think that the experience of being an art student, there's something about it that I sort of still identify with,” Armisen says. “Over the years, once in a while, someone will mention to me that they went to SVA, and it's really fun and funny when that happens, because it's rare enough that all of a sudden, I feel very connected to that person.”

Maeri Ferguson is the assistant director of media relations at SVA. Her writing has appeared in No Depression, Glide Magazine, and The Bluegrass Situation.

A version of this article appears in the spring/summer 2025 Visual Arts Journal.