Neil Court is one of four partners in DECODE Entertainment, a Toronto-based company that finances, develops, produces and distributes family and children’s television shows for worldwide audiences, reported the Owen Sound Sun Times Jan. 20 in a profile of a native son. He studied journalism at Carleton University but was unsuccessful in landing a job after graduating in 1981. A chance meeting with a Toronto film producer led to a job selling TV programs for a production company. He advanced through the ranks and continued his education at the same time, earning a master’s degree in business administration through part-time studies at York University.
Not long after he graduated in 1986, Telefilm Canada came calling. “Telefilm Canada was very much populated by people who had been in the production business,” Court said. “The managing director of Telefilm at the time decided that they needed someone from the distribution sector, the marketing side, but they should also get someone with an MBA because, in the late ’80s, that was the thing to have. They literally did a trawl through the country and the only person who had both this recent experience and an MBA was me. So I basically was drafted.”
Schulich makes headlines in Asian media
York University’s Schulich School of Business figured prominently in a number of business publications in Southeast Asia recently. The December issue of the Hong Kong Economic Journal Monthly, the Chinese territory’s leading business publication, published a major feature on the business school and a profile of one of the school’s most accomplished alumni, Edmund Ho (BBA ’78), the chief executive of Macau. The issue included an interview with Dean Dezsö J. Horváth, the 2004 Academy of International Business Dean of the Year, as well as an article by alumnus Jonathan Cheung (MBA ’73), Schulich country manager for China and the person responsible for managing the school’s new recruitment, career and executive education centre in Beijing.
During a recent keynote speech to the De La Salle Professional Schools’ Graduate School of Business in Manila, Horváth told a gathering of business executives and government officials that the Philippines was falling behind in the race toward industrialization and global integration and said Vietnam was more open to foreign investment. His remarks, widely reported by the national press in the Philippines, set off a national debate.
Dancer mines native roots
Kaha:wi may be a performance piece rooted in Iroquois song and dance, but the themes of life and death are universal to all cultures, according to dancer-choreographer and York grad Santee Smith, reported the Calgary Herald Jan. 20. Combining traditional and contemporary elements, Kaha:wi (Mohawk for “she carries”) conveys the circle of life through three generations of women. “Although the piece has a lot of cultural content, there are many universal themes, like birth and death and love and community, so I think that people can take parts of it and really connect with it,” says Smith, who earned a master of fine arts degree in dance from York University last year.
‘The Q’ remembered as much-loved judge
Justice Georgina Quijano, affectionately called “The Q” by Victoria lawyers who specialize in family law, died at home Jan. 17. She was 62, reported The Vancouver Sun Jan. 20. Quijano received her law degree in 1975 from York’s Osgoode Hall Law School. She began practising at the Vancouver law firm Shrum, Liddle & Hebenton, becoming a specialist in family law.