Elizabeth MacCallum is a prizewinning print and television journalist. Since her childhood with multiple major surgeries, she has been particularly aware of people with differences and it shaped her career in many ways. Her first freelance film was about the young Christine Karcza, a handicapped community development officer at the March of Dimes. MacCallum, working up from a research position at the CBC’s Nature of Things to director, produced and directed The People You Never See, a prizewinning social look at the effects of cerebral palsy, as well as The Mind’s Eye, about the development of vision with Nobel prizewinners Hubel and Wiesel.
Switching to print journalism after having children, she was long time children’s book critic of the Globe and Mail, and later at the National Post where she also wrote a popular gardening column. MacCallum also wrote freelance articles for newspapers and magazines, often focusing on pain.
Because of physical limitations, MacCallum found volunteer work easier to manage although it often seemed like more than one full-time job. Since returning to Toronto after living two years in Beijing just after the death of Mao Zedong in 1975, refugees have been a big part of her life starting with Chinese defectors to Guatamalans, Somalis (two familes, a total of 23 people at once) Kurds, people from Democratic Republic of the Congo, and most recently, Columbians. She also volunteered with preschool multiple handicapped children for 18 years, sang in church choirs all her adult life, belonged to the board of The Orford String Quartet, and volunteered with immigrant children in after school programmes.