Dr. Mark Terry
Professor, Postdoctoral Fellow, Documentary Filmmaker
Mark Terry, a contract professor at York University in Toronto and Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, is the Chair of the Advanced Disaster, Emergency and Rapid Response Simulation Arctic Group and an associate of the UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education through Sustainability. He is also a documentary filmmaker specializing in youth climate projects for the United Nations. He has worked with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in this capacity since 2009.
In 2011, Dr. Terry partnered with the UNFCCC and introduced the Youth Climate Report (YCR), a collection of documentary shorts produced by young filmmakers around the world edited together in a one-hour feature documentary. The YCR project continued in this format until 2015 when a new multilinear, interactive, database film project presented on a platform of a Geographic Information System map of the world was introduced at the COP21 climate summit in Paris, France.
Dr. Terry regularly attends the COP conferences presenting approximately 60 new films each year on climate research produced by the global community of youth. The films are presented on a remediation of the documentary film conceived by Dr. Terry called the Geo-Doc. Some of the films created for this project are made by participants of the Planetary Health Film Lab, a SSHRC-funded workshop led by Dr. Terry.
Mark has been decorated by Queen Elizabeth for this work with her Diamond Jubilee Medal and by The Explorers Club with its Stefansson Medal, the organization’s highest honour. The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television gave him their rarely-presented Gemini Humanitarian Award for his unique contributions in bridging the gap between science and policy through film with the United Nations. His work in the polar regions earned him a place on Canadian Geographic Magazine’s Top 100 Greatest Explorers list in 2015.
Contact Dr. Mark Terry: marktery@yorku.ca / 416-899-5855 / markterry.academia.edu
Publications
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.