James Macgillivray is a lecturer at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Prior to his position at Daniels, Macgillivray was Assistant Professor of Practice in Architecture at the University of Michigan where he was awarded the William Muschenheim Design Fellowship in 2011.

Along with Vivian Lee, Macgillivray is a founding partner of LAMAS a design practice with projects in Italy, Canada and the United States. LAMAS was a 2014 finalist for MoMA's PS1 Young Architects Program. Macgillivray is a filmmaker and has published on film, architecture and projection in Scapegoat, ACSA Journal, The Journal of Modern Craft, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Tarkovsky, a collection of writings on the work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. In conjunction with his work at LAMAS he is currently writing a book that delineates the notion of space in the arts of architecture and film.

Before founding LAMAS Macgillivray worked as a designer at Steven Holl Architects and as a project manager at Peter Gluck and Partners Architects where his project won the 2013 AIA Housing Award.