Victoria Campbell has always been a storyteller, with the Vineyard providing some of her earliest inspirations.

“This was a great place to foster the imagination,” the actress-turned-filmmaker said last week over the telephone from her parents’ home in Vineyard Haven.

“I spent a lot of time in the woods alone, walking and making up stories in my head and talking to the trees, so that was a good beginning,” said Ms. Campbell, who recently co-curated a film series for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York city.

Screening at MoMA Feb. 16 and Feb. 17, the program celebrates the Millennium Film Workshop, an influential hub for experimental filmmakers since the 1960s.

“It was this falling-apart place in the East Village, but with all this crazy history,” Ms. Campbell said.

“Andy Warhol had been through there. Todd Haynes had shown his first film there. Steve Buscemi used to rent equipment . . . A whole slew of names,” she said.

Ms. Campbell discovered the workshop after making her debut film, House of Bones, about her family on the Vineyard.

“I had my first New York screening there. A hundred people came, and it was great,” she recalled. “Then I worked there and took tickets and saw all kinds of films I would never have seen, [and] then I decided I needed to go back to school.”

She chose the documentary program at New York’s School of Visual Arts, learning new ways to tell the stories in her head.

“I want to experiment with what a documentary can be,” Ms. Campbell said. “I like the texture of it. You’re not dependent on a studio or a crew — you can go out and do these stories on your own.”

She also learned visual techniques at the film workshop, which closed in 2011 and sold its archives to MoMA.

“Millennium really taught me how to use Super 8,” she said, referring to the Eastman Kodak color film format introduced in 1965. “I would go and film the city with Super 8 and all of a sudden it has a beautiful old look to it.”

She also used the format in Haiti, where she worked as a humanitarian volunteer after the 2010 earthquake.

Compared to the immense capacity of digital files, Ms. Campbell said, film stock imposes a certain discipline.

“I think you shoot with more focus,” she said.

Her journey to filmmaking began on the stage, as she sought to establish an acting career after college.

“I was really driven towards acting, since I was a young kid,” she said. “I loved theatre, and that was solidly what I thought I would end up doing.”

But after majoring in French and Italian literature at Bard college, she ran into the hard realities of pursuing an acting career in both New York and Los Angeles.

“New York was a lot harder than I thought, auditioning and trying to make money as an actress,” she said. “We did Shakespeare in the parking lot, not in the park.”

Ms. Campbell found some film roles in L.A., but scoffs at the work she did, such as portraying “the Angry Woman” in a cable-TV life of Christ.

“I was supposed to be Mary Magdalene, but [the actor playing] Jesus was too tiny,” she recalled.

Other potential bookings were also uninspiring, she said.

“They really liked me for the reality show [with] Flava Flav. It was things like that, like be the girlfriend or the best friend,” she said. “I hate that feeling of waiting to do someone else’s work and be directed. You relinquish so much of your own power, which I did for so long.”

Back in New York, Ms. Campbell finally acted on what a filmmaking friend had been suggesting to her since their college years.

“He had always told me to grab a camera and film my family,” she said.

The death of her beloved grandmother catapulted House of Bones into being.

“They were going to sell [her] house that summer,” said Ms. Campbell, who recalled her next thought: “I’m going to friggin’ get a camera and capture this crazy house and all the characters.”

Teaching herself as she went along, Ms. Campbell traced the struggle of her grief-stricken family members with the loss of both the family matriarch and her generational Island home.

Her more recent documentaries include Dimka, which profiles a cross-dressing Russian exile and was shown during the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society’s Spectrum festival last spring, and Monsieur le Président, shot during her trips to Haiti.

Ms. Campbell’s shorter, more experimental works are represented in the MoMA screenings with In Betweens, a six-minute, 35-second audiovisual tapestry of New York.

Weaving interior and exterior shots, found footage, environmental sounds and spoken words, the film acts as a meditation on time, space and consciousness as well as a portrait of the city.

“I was playing around with how we see in New York, and also space and how space has changed,” said Ms. Campbell, who included shots from the old Millennium center after it closed.

“Sometimes in New York, things are so quick, you’re not always aware of how [quickly] things are changing,” she said.

Her other work, as a middle-school teacher in the South Bronx, led to a short film in the series made by two of her students, the siblings Roberto and Anexsa Polanco.

“They had an idea and they went out and made a film,” she said of the Polancos’ dystopian Future Visions.

Her own middle-school years were not her happiest, Ms. Campbell recalled. “I was very eager to leave the Island and see the world,” she said.

Now, she’s not only back in the middle grades — she’s on the Vineyard again, too: During a year off from Middle School 562 in the South Bronx, Ms. Campbell is teaching English to seventh and eighth graders at West Tisbury School, just up the road from where she attended the Tisbury School in the 1980s.

“It’s so funny that I’m back at the one place I was so eager to leave,” said Ms. Campbell, who is also living with her parents, in her childhood bedroom, with a small daughter of her own.

But the Vineyard also provides both a refuge from urban life and the chance to reconnect with her earliest creativity.

“This Island is always my inner architecture,” Ms. Campbell said.