Amherst, MA – James MacAllister, award winning producer, director, editor, and videographer of medical and science programs died in his home on Tuesday, March 24. He was 78.
During MacAllister’s 30-year career, his videos educated doctors, nurses, and scientists in the latest technology and technical advancements. In addition, along with partner, Ernest Urvater, he collaborated on many art history, music, and cultural documentaries throughout the 1990s. Notable is a series of films for the Emily Dickinson museum about the poet’s life and work.
In 2001, MacAllister began working with Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution. He joined her lab at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004 and, at Margulis’ suggestion, enrolled in a Masters degree program. Upon graduation, MacAllister continued to work as a teaching assistant in the lab. Upon her death in 2011, he started the Environmental Evolution Newsletter which tracked the acceptance by mainstream biology and medicine of Margulis’ theories. Today, those theories are widely accepted.
MacAllister is a contributor on a number of papers in the primary literature. His masters thesis, Toward A Field Of Evolution Geography: A Contextual View Of Earth Through Deep Time, laid the foundation for an experimental course at the University taught by Professor of Geography, Richard Wilkie and Margulis. He was an associate producer on the documentary “Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis rocked the boat and started a scientific revolution.”
MacAllister was instrumental in recovering and digitizing seventy-three films that were produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the National Science Foundation. This collection, which was in danger of being lost, documented growth phenomena in a variety of organisms. Thanks to MacAllister’s efforts, the Developmental Biology Film Series is available to teachers and the public through UMASS Amherst’s Special Collections Library.
The University will present the first annual Jim MacAllister Award in Geography to a student in Spring 2026.
James MacAllister is survived by his wife, Eunice, son, Michael, grandson Austin, his brothers, Robert and David, and numerous devoted friends.
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