James Donald

Background

About James Donald

Filmmaker James Donald is now Executive Producer at DigiNovations, an award-winning video production company serving corporate, nonprofit and academic clients in Boston and around the world. Previously, Donald worked as a video producer at edX, MIT and Harvard's non-profit partnership to help create exemplary Massive Open Online Courses for the world. Donald produced numerous online courses and marketing videos for edX and edX's partners, content that has been seen by many hundreds of thousands of online students. Donald also led media trainings for new edX partners and used edX's video data to help promote media best practices (via data visualizations on Tableau). Before edX, Donald collaborated with documentary filmmaker John Rubin over a 13 year period. Starting as associate producer in January Donald finished as a senior producer at John Rubin Productions in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over those thirteen years, Donald helped to produce 22 films for National Geographic and PBS (detailed on his IMDB page). Topics include redwood trees, Fenway Park, skunks, the American biowarfare program, birds of prey, ape intelligence, invasive species, mummies in Papua New Guinea, and many others. During that time, Donald won the Peabody Award, and his films have won two National Emmys (out of six total nominations), numerous CINE Golden Eagles, the New York Festivals’ World Gold Medal, two Tellys and the “Forest Hero” award at the 2011 International Forest Film Festival (sponsored by the U.N.). Separately, Donald acted as producer, editor and director of The New Biology, a 40-minute documentary film produced for Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. The film premiered at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in 2010 and won a CINE Masters Series Award in 2012.