Andrea Lekushoff, BA'92, MBA '01, is preserving the stories behind individuals, founders, and family enterprises as cinematic heirloom assets — before they are gone.
There is a particular kind of loss that arrives quietly, long before anyone is ready for it.
It is not the loss of a life, but the loss of a voice. The specific cadence of a story told for the hundredth time. The way a person lights up recounting their first risk, their worst failure, their proudest moment. These things disappear, not all at once but slowly, and most families only realize they are gone when it is far too late to capture them.
Andrea Lekushoff built CONTEXT Studios because she understood this loss before it happened. And she was determined to do something about it.
A gap in the market - a gap in her own family
The idea for CONTEXT Studios did not begin in a boardroom. It began with Lekushoff's own parents.
As they moved through their 80s, she wanted to preserve their story: a Macedonian immigrant story, full of the kinds of hard-won wisdom and quiet dignity that rarely make it onto a page. But her parents were not writers. They would not sit down and dictate a memoir. The conventional tools for preserving a life, the anniversary book, the written biography, simply were not built for them.
So Lekushoff found another way. She developed a process to capture her parents' story in a form that was easy on them physically and emotionally, while producing something cinematic, authentic, and enduring. That process became the foundation of CONTEXT Studios, and the "secret sauce" she now brings to some of the most accomplished founders, executives, and family enterprise leaders in the country.
"We are turning life stories, entrepreneurial journeys, and family business legacies into cinematic experiences," says Lekushoff.
We capture not just what people have accomplished, but who they are, what they value, and the impact they had and want to leave behind.
The CONTEXT Studios Experience
Lekushoff began developing the concept just before COVID and launched CONTEXT Studios in 2024. Her team produces Netflix-calibre documentary films for high-net-worth individuals, founders, and multi-generational family enterprise leaders. The signature offering is built around a single, focused production day, though some clients opt for a more expansive program that captures additional stories, voices, and locations with greater depth.
The process begins with a deep discovery conversation, followed by eight weeks of collaborative pre-production in which Lekushoff and her team develop the narrative arc and episode structure. On production day, all footage is captured in a single sitting. Over the following months, the team crafts each episode, exploring a defining chapter of a life or company, a pivotal challenge within a family, a lesson that took decades to learn, and delivers the completed series to a private streaming platform, accessible on any device, for the client and the generations that follow.
The result is something that no anniversary book or photo album can replicate.
"It is a record of identity," says Lekushoff.
It is meant to inspire and impact future generations and be treasured like an heirloom, especially when a loved one or founder is gone and the story of who they were and what they built risks being lost with them. To have them in the palm of your hand, telling you their favourite stories the way only they could, it does not get better than that.
Discretion is central to the CONTEXT Studios experience. The films are never shared publicly, and most commissions remain private. Among some of the clients who can be named are the Stein family, behind the iconic retail brand Henry's; former McCarthy Tétrault CEO Dave Leonard; Victoria Sopik and Jennifer Nashmi of Kids and Company, the female founders who transformed the Canadian childcare industry; Ashlynne Dale of Norwood Sawmills; and the family behind Hangar9, the luxury women's retailer named Canada's top family business in 2025.
The founder behind the camera
To understand what makes CONTEXT Studios distinctive, it helps to understand the person who built it.
Lekushoff grew up watching her father, a student of the renowned architect Raymond Moriyama, build his construction firm FARWIN from the ground up, eventually reaching 100 employees and leaving his mark on projects at Canada's Wonderland, the University of Toronto, and York University.
"I grew up watching my father build something from nothing," she says. "He employed people, he left his mark on the city, and he was completely in control of his future. That image never left me."
That early imprint stayed with her. But it took more than a decade, and a remarkable set of formative experiences, before she took the leap herself.
After attending the Toronto French School, she studied French Language and Literature at Western, then spent over a year in France as an au pair, visiting art galleries every weekend. She got her start in PR working in the press office of the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Back in Toronto, she joined Cohn and Wolfe before returning to Ivey to complete her MBA in 1999. During her studies, she did a summer internship at Brightspark Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. Upon graduation in 2001, she joined Deloitte as a Strategy consultant. Three years later, she walked away to pursue a dream she had carried since her days in Washington: her own PR agency.
I just quit. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do. And I thought, this is the only way I am going to do it.
In 2004, she launched Broad Reach Communications. Her first client was Deloitte. Within six months, Broad Reach had become Deloitte's PR agency of record, not because of familiarity, but because Lekushoff had spotted exactly where they were underserved and built something to address it. She has been doing the same thing ever since.
Where curiosity became conviction
Lekushoff credits much of her entrepreneurial foundation to the Ivey Business School.
At Ivey, she devoured every entrepreneurship course available, became president of the Entrepreneurship Club, and discovered a particular kind of mentor in Bob Nourse, the former CEO of The Bombay Company and Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year in 1993. As president of the club, she invited Canadian business visionaries including Harry Rosen and Christine Magee of Sleep Country Canada to share their knowledge with members.
"Bob’s story about purchasing the Bombay Company in 1979 and growing it to 450 stores was incredible," she says. "I looked forward to his classes every week."
She also co-founded LeaderLab at Ivey, the school's first global webcast event, driven by a conviction that Ivey's students deserved direct access to the world's most inspiring business minds. She secured speakers including Fast Company founder Allan Weber, Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, and former U.S. Naval Commander Mike Abrashoff, and livestreamed the event to Ivey students and alumni around the world. It was, characteristically, a response to a gap she had found and refused to leave unfilled.
Marrying creativity and structure
Lekushoff is quick to name the tension at the heart of her career: the pull between creative exploration and entrepreneurial discipline.
"My creative side thrives on exploration," she says. "Oh, let me chase after this! But my entrepreneurial side demands structure, strategy, and discipline," she says.
That tension, she has learned, is not a problem to be solved. It is the source of her work's quality. The cinematic craft of CONTEXT Studios documentaries would not be possible without the business rigour that ensures each project is delivered with precision. And the business would not be worth building without the artistic instinct that makes the films genuinely moving and of the highest quality.
Her advice to other creatives: identify your deepest area of expertise and build the structure that lets you share it at the highest possible level.
Why this work matters now
There is an urgency to what CONTEXT Studios does that goes beyond sentiment.
The generation of founders and family enterprise leaders currently approaching the later chapters of their lives represents one of the greatest concentrations of hard-won wisdom in modern history. These are people who built things, navigated crises, made decisions no textbook prepared them for, and passed their values, deliberately or unconsciously, to the people who came after them.
Most of those stories will not survive in any meaningful form unless someone does something deliberate to preserve them.
Lekushoff has made it her life's work to be that someone.
"Entrepreneurship became a way for me not just to create impact and control my destiny," she says, "but to build and realize my full potential."
At CONTEXT Studios, that potential is being realized, frame by frame, story by story, in the service of legacies that deserve to last.
To learn more about CONTEXT Studios or to explore what a documentary experience might look like for you, your family, or your clients, visit www.contextstudios.ca.