LIFT Staff Farewell – January 2024

January 5, 2024

Best Wishes to Development Coordinator Cayley James

LIFT wishes a fond farewell to our Development Coordinator Cayley James. For the past five years, Cayley has been a significant member of the team, both in building our fundraising capacity, spearheading grant writing, and in leading some of our important special projects. In the past few years, she worked behind the scenes in relaunching our Production and Post-Production Support Grants; project managing and developing our Newcomer Mentorship program; and finalizing our “Transformations: A Cross-Generational Commissioning Project.” She has also been an integral part of LIFT’s programming team, initiating the seasonal screening series that ran through 2019; curating two series marking our 40th anniversary, “Unsteady Landscapes” and “Shadows and Light” on VUCAVU, and our “imagineNATIVE x LIFT Originals” retrospective series, during the pandemic; and bringing us back to in-person screenings with the 2022 “Memory in Motion” program marking the UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage and the return of the “LIFT Round-Up” at the Paradise Theatre this past December. We wish her the best as she moves on to the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (WAHC) in Hamilton and look forward to seeing her around the neighbourhood. Her final day at LIFT will be on Monday, January 8, 2024.

“I’m not very good at goodbyes and although I’m occasionally prone to hyperbole I mean it when I say that my time at LIFT has been one of the most significant experiences of my life, both personally and professionally. In May of 2018 I joined the staff as an intern and had no idea what was in store for me. I was given the space to grow and experiment in my role. I was able to spearhead so many different projects, collaborate with my colleagues and learn alongside the extremely talented LIFT community. Despite the variety of my work a single theme ran through it all—understanding the importance of LIFT in Toronto’s cultural landscape. Celebrating its past, present and future. LIFT is a truly unique space and like so many artist run centres is greater than the sum of its parts.”
—Cayley James

Cayley James is an arts administrator and writer based in Toronto. For the past ten years she has worked in the independent arts on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2013, she completed her MLITT in Film and Television at the University of Glasgow. She joined the staff at LIFT in 2018 and her writing has been featured in Cinema Scope and The Globe and Mail.