After TMU — Tendisai Cromwell

1. What is a typical “Day in Your Work Life” like?

I typically begin my 12-hour workday at home by checking my schedule, responding to urgent emails, and setting my daily priorities. If I’m not offsite at a meeting or community event, I make my way to the office to work alongside my small but mighty team in the Daniels Spectrum cultural hub. I regularly meet with my staff, particularly management, to ensure that we’re on track to deliver strong, community-centred programming.

Depending on the time of the year, I may dedicate part of the day to anything from securing sponsorships and grant-writing to reviewing the festival lineup and drafting speeches. I spend an inordinate amount of time replying to an endless stream of emails from various stakeholders. The office is always filled with joy and laughter and we often receive visits from fellow Daniels Spectrum tenants for potlucks or just to share moments together.

Unless I have board meeting that takes me deeper into the night, I generally leave the office between 6:30-7:30 pm, eager to spend time with my daughter and husband.

2. What are the best parts of your job; what are the necessary evils?

The Best Parts: The transformative experiences that take place at our Annual Festival in the fall and the beauty of gathering thousands of people to watch films under a setting sun (at our summer screening series). Also, I truly enjoy spending most of my weekday waking hours with my Regent Park Film Festival family—a kind, committed, talented group of people.

Necessary Evil: My complete inability to maintain any kind of work-life balance.

3. Why did you choose to study at Ryerson University?

I consider myself a storyteller, and I first told myself that journalism would be the best and most practical path to employ my storytelling skills. I then decided that TMU’s highly-regarded Master of Journalism program would refine said skills while also providing the industry connections to secure a job upon graduation.

4. What are some skills you developed through university that help you in your career?

I really valued the interview skills I gained while at TMU. I’ve employed them when moderating discussions and I believe that I’m a far more compelling interviewer than I would have been otherwise. I also took a magazine journalism class that proved to be useful in narrative/storytelling for grants and speechwriting.

5. What do you wish you could tell your university self?

Tendisai, you should have stuck with French the whole way through, embraced experiential learning, travelled more, cultivated closer relationships with your professors, wrote more consistently, worked harder, and spent far less time doubting your abilities and feeling out of place. You belonged there.

6. How did your experience at TMU help you find your first position after graduation?

After taking a TV documentary class at TMU, in which I produced a short doc with a small team, I developed an appreciation for media arts. Being lead producer was exceedingly challenging but ultimately rewarding. This experience led me to establish an independent production company, which in turn resulted in my first post-graduation job in the production department of the Canadian Film Centre. If I hadn’t taken this class at TMU, I likely wouldn’t have embarked upon this path.

7. What are some attributes of individuals who are most successful in your field?

Community-oriented, curious, compassionate, committed, collaborative and—breaking the alliteration—joyful.

8. If you could start all over again, would you change your career path?

Yes and no. I love what I do, and I would like to stay in the arts & culture sector for the foreseeable future, but I have a growing interest in virtual/augmented reality and the endless applications of this technology. We program VR documentaries at the festival, which makes me exceedingly happy, but it would be fascinating to work at a VR media lab that embraces and rewards experimentation.