Make it stand out
Dr. Mark Terry
Filmmaker in Residence
Mark Terry, PhD, is a faculty member at York University in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and an Adjunct Professor (English and Film) at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. He is an academic Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and The Explorers Club. He is also the Director of the City of Vaughan’s Social and Environmental Sustainability program and the Executive Director of the United Nations’ Youth Climate Report.
Dr. Terry has worked with the United Nations since 2011 on the Youth Climate Report, a digital database documentary film project curating video reports made by young filmmakers aged 18 to 35 of climate research, impacts, and solutions for its annual climate summits known as the COP conferences. The project won the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Action Award in 2021.
He has worked throughout the Circumpolar Arctic as a documentary filmmaker. He produced the first documented film of a crossing of the Northwest Passage, The Polar Explorer (2011). He has also worked in Antarctica documenting climate research in the film The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning (2009). In 2021, the third installment in his trilogy of polar documentary feature films, The Changing Face of Iceland premiered at the United Nations climate summit, COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2015, Canadian Geographic Magazine named Dr. Terry one of the “top 100 explorers of all time”.
In the past two years, he has published three academic books The Geo-Doc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change; The Emerging Role of Geomedia in the Environmental Humanities; Speaking Youth to Power: Influencing Climate Policy at the United Nations.
His current research projects include: The Young Lives Research Lab (York University); Social and Environmental Sustainability Program (City of Vaughan); Youth Climate Report (United Nations); Ghana Youth Videography Programme (Wilfrid Laurier University); Youth in the Digital Age (York University); and Young Reporters for the Environment (University of Copenhagen).
In 2024, he won the J. Robert Cox Award for Environmental Communication and Civic Engagement presented by the National Communications Association based in Washington. He has been decorated by Queen Elizabeth with her Diamond Jubilee Medal, the Explorers Club with its Stefansson Medal; and the City of Vaughan with an investiture in its Order of Vaughan. His influential documentary film work has been recognized by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television when he was given their Humanitarian Award in 2013.
Contact Dr. Mark Terry: terrma@yorku.ca / 416-899-5855 / markterry.academia.edu
Selected Publications
The United Nations’ Youth Climate Report: A New Participatory Policy Platform for Youth (author). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. 315 pp.
“Towards Youth-Centred Planetary Health Education,” Challenges (January, 2023), 15 pp. https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/14/1/3
The Geo-Doc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change, published by Palgrave MacMillan, released March, 2020. The book features the United Nations’ Youth Climate Report as field research in this area of documentary theory.