Dr. Mark Terry    |   416-899-5855   |    markterryatyorku@gmail.com

Dr. Terry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Associate of the UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability at York University in Toronto, Canada. He teaches in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York as well as at Glendon College and Ryerson University in Toronto, and Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

Curriculum Vitae   |   Biography   |   LinkedIn   |   Filmmaker (IMDB Profile)   |   The Youth Climate Report   |   Media Page   |   Photo Gallery   |   Video Gallery   |   The Geo-Doc   |   Pandemic Poetry   

In 2009, Dr. Terry was invited by the United Nations Framework on Climate Change to screen his film The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning to world leaders and delegates at the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen. He was asked to return the next year to screen The Polar Explorer at COP16 and met with policymakers to help draft new policies on rising sea levels and other issues. The content of these films was used as “visible evidence” on the issue of sea-level rise caused by glacier collapse in the polar regions and resulted in the creation of the resolution known as Enhanced Action on Adaptation: Section II, Subsection 25 in the Cancun Accord.

The following year, he was asked to create a film project for the global community of youth so their voices would be heard at these UN policymaking conferences. The Youth Climate Report project was presented in 2011 as a documentary feature film showcasing five short films made by young people around the world. The project maintained this format until the demand for more films resulted in the adoption of GIS technologies as a platform to showcase an unlimited number of films. In 2015, The Youth Climate Report GIS Project was introduced at the Parish climate summit and today showcases nearly 500 films representing climate reports on all seven continents.

This UN project is detailed in Dr. Terry’s book entitled The Geo-Doc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.

Dr. Terry writes and speaks about a number of subjects related to film and the environment. Along with climate change, he lectures on the subjects of ecocinema, documentary film theory and practice as well as the artists behind the ever-evolving genre known as the Hollywood musical.

Current and Future Projects:

  1. The Planetary Health Film Lab: A workshop for youth training them how to make documentary short films about planetary health issues in their respective home countries and communities. In 2021, the project will focus on the Indigenous youth of the Circumpolar Arctic.
  2. The Student Life Levy Project: Shepherding students through the challenges of film production during a pandemic, this program offered by Wilfrid Laurier University is offered as an extracurricular activity to provide social interaction outside the classroom.
  3. The Ghana Film Project: A SSHRC-funded research project headed by Laurier professors Jeff Grischow and Magnus Mfoafo-M’Carthy, this project will provide seminars on social action documentary filmmaking to students in Ghana.
  4. The Ecological Footprint Initiative: This two-year research project curated and codified more than 300 scientific papers on the subject of the Ecological Footprint, a framework conceived in 1990 by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Terry is co-author of the project’s final report and principal engineer of the GIS project which geolocates all 300+ papers.
  5. The Academic Innovation Fund: Dr. Terry was awarded funding from this program to develop a new pedagogy for teaching and learning incorporating geomedia in the classroom.
  6. Mapping the Environmental Humanities: The Emerging Role of GIS in Ecocriticism: Dr. Terry is editing a new volume in this nascent field of study with GIS scholar Professor Michael Hewson from Central Queensland University in Australia. Published by Rowan & Littlefield. Expected release date: Fall, 2021, 400 pp.
  7. Communicating in the Anthropocene: This new volume published by Lexington Books was released on January 15, 2021, and features a chapter by Dr. Terry entitled “A Proposed New Communications Tool for Planetary Health”. Edited by Alexa M. Dare and C. Vail Fletcher. 546 pp.
  8. The Changing Face of Iceland: The third documentary feature film in Dr. Terry’s polar trilogy – the other two being The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning and The Polar Explorer. This new film is currently being scored by award-winning composer Russell Walker and is expected for release in the Spring of 2021. 52 minutes.
  9. The Quantum Film Festival: Dr. Terry will serve as co-host and adjudicator for the international film festival showcasing stories related to quantum physics and mechanics. The annual festival is run by the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo.