During graduate school, Zanisnik realized that the home videos he made as an adolescent—casting his family in Stanley Kubrick- and Martin Scorsese-inspired dramas—were an important part of his beginning as an artist. He later re-cut these home videos and incorporated them in his work.

His projects have included staging a boxing match with his childhood bully, exploring and documenting New Jersey’s Meadowlands, and creating The Philip Roth Presidential Library from hundreds of second-hand copies of books by and about the author. Having created more than thirty performances in collaboration with his parents, Zanisnik, in the New York Close Up film “Bryan Zanisnik & Eric Winkler’s Animated Conversation,” discusses his life and practice following the loss of his mother in 2015.