Dr. Mark Terry is a Canadian scholar, explorer, filmmaker and adjunct professor in the Department of Communications and Media Studies, York University and the Departments of Communication Studies and Global Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University. He teaches courses on ecocinema, geomedia, environmental communication, and film history.
Dr. Terry has earned a reputation as one of the world’s leading experts in Environmental Communication based on his work in a variety of fields including: Creating The Youth Climate Report GIS map in 2015 which now has over 1300 three to five-minute films made by youth between 18 and 30 from 170 countries, spotlighting climate and environmental issues and solutions, juried by United Nations Framework on Climate Change, and used to educate, inform and bridge the gap between science and policy makers. Attending 17 COPs, where he screened student films and his own environmentally-based films including ‘The Antarctica Challenge – A Global Warning’, 2009, ‘The Polar Explorer’, 2010, and The Changing Face of Iceland, 2020. Addressing world leaders and delegates and sitting down with policymakers to draft new rising sea level policy, combined with the YCR project and academic research papers earned Dr. Terry earned him a membership in The Royal Canadian Geographical Society and their Gold Medal in Environmental Communication in 2026. Following his work Vaughan, Ontario’s environmental programs to achieve their SDG goals he became an invested member of the Order of Vaughan in 2020.
Dr. Terry’s research in the field of environmental communications is documented in the critically-acclaimed book called The Geo-Doc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change, published by Palgrave-MacMillan. Two more books were published in 2022, bearing Dr. Terry’s name. The first, Speaking Youth to Power – Influencing Climate Policy at the United Nations, was authored by him alone and examines a variety of ways for youth around the world to influence environmental UN policymakers and was again published by Palgrave-MacMillan. The second book, Mapping the Environmental Humanities – The Emerging Role of Geomedia in the Environmental Humanities, published by Rowman and Littlefield, was co-edited by Dr. Mark Terry and Dr. Michael Hewson, who each contributed one chapter.
As a professor and public speaker, Dr. Terry combines a facility with academic terms mixed with language that best reaches his targeted audience and makes complex thoughts easy to comprehend. Dr. Terry lectures on his experiences with the United Nations developing international environmental policy as well as a variety of academic subjects such as documentary film and theory, eco-cinema, climate change, and the polar regions, among other subjects. He taught workshops with indigenous youth, teaching them how to create three-minute videos to be added to the Youth Climate Report and inform UN policymakers and their own country leaders about the environmental issues affecting them and solutions, in via The 2021 Planetary Health Film Lab was held in Canada in 2022 as well as in Ecuador; and three from 2022 to 2024 through the Ghana Youth Video Programme in 2022; and in 2023 and 2024. The students’ films were added to the Youth Climate Report and many of them were either presented by Dr. Terry to world leaders and policy makers at multiple COPs, or by some of the students themselves who joined Dr. Terry at a COP.
Dr. Terry is an experienced media artist and researcher on many subjects (climate change, polar regions, documentary film theory, commercial theatre, exploration, and Hollywood musicals), speaking at many conferences on these topics. Having worked in the entertainment industry before returning to school in 2014 to get his Master’s and PhD, Dr. Terry has had the opportunity to write and narrate several projects for film and television and be involved in the practical side of production on many levels.