Elaine Calder
Secretary, Board of Directors
Elaine Calder retired to Victoria in 2015 after a professional career of more than 30 years as a Senior Arts Executive. During that time, she worked in Canada and the USA leading four theatre companies, two orchestras, the Canadian Opera Company and the National Arts Centre. She was frequently recruited as someone who could restore financial stability to organizations in distress, and was proud to take the Oregon Symphony to Carnegie Hall only two years after leading it through near bankruptcy during the 2008/09 recession.
She considers herself fortunate to have worked in partnership with brilliant artistic directors including Richard Bradshaw (Canadian Opera Company), Martha Henry (Grand Theatre, London) and Christopher Newton (Shaw Festival), and over the years she enjoyed working with hundreds of superb creative and performing artists.
She was born in London, England and spent ten years living in Kent before moving with her family to Canada in 1957. She earned a BA in Art History at McGill University, and an MBA from the University of Western Ontario where she also spent two years teaching marketing in the MBA program. She retains Canadian, British, and American citizenship.
Elaine first met Timothy Vernon at an opera conference in Victoria in the early 1990s, and they immediately became good friends. She and her husband William Bennett came to see Pacific Opera Victoria’s production of L’Amore dei Tre Rei in 1996, and after that they returned almost every year to see the lesser-known works that Pacific Opera Victoria regularly explores. The decision to retire to Victoria was an easy one: their daughter Allegra lives in Seattle, and the combination of a pleasant climate, excellent cultural organizations, small-city convenience, and Canadian healthcare was hard to resist.