James is a development consultant and videographer who works closely with businesses, Indigenous communities and tribal organizations in areas of governance, administration, economic development, business operations, and training. He has extensively documented important resistance movements and rights struggles related to forestry, fisheries, and other resource sectors.

James is also active professionally in areas related to heritage, material culture, and folklore. He records documentary footage on a wide variety of subjects, including oral histories and stories. He is also engaged in the archival preservation and digitization of historical documents, video, and photographs.

James has held Research Fellow appointments with the Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM) in New York, and the Institute for International Studies (IIS) at Teachers College, Columbia University. Over the years, he has served as a guest speaker in business, law, political science, and anthropology courses, on subjects ranging from political resistance to videographic techniques and anthropological field methods—and, having spent the bulk of his career in the private sector, entrepreneurship.

For over twenty years, James had the pleasure and privilege of learning from, and collaborating with, Lambros Comitas, the “professor’s professor,” known among other things for teaching with stories. In the early aughts and beyond, James was one of a few who spent long hours with Lambros, visioning and planning the institute that would one day bear his name. Along the way, numerous video and audio recordings were made of Lambros “working his magic” in the field and holding forth on countless subjects with the skill and wit of the great raconteur he was known to be.

Their final project in the field was to film cannabis operations, entrepreneurs, and inventors over a 10-day period in 2019, with Comitas a spry 91 years of age!

On March 9, 2020, James delivered Lambros’s eulogy in Manhattan’s Greek Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.