Mark Terry, PhD, is a Contract Faculty member at York University, Toronto, and Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. He teaches courses on ecocinema, geomedia, environmental communication, and film history. He is also a distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an invested member of the Order of Vaughan.
He has addressed world leaders and delegates in conjunction with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at COP15 following screenings of his films, ‘The Antarctica Challenge – A Global Warning’ in 2009 and ‘The Polar Explorer’ in 2010. He also sat down with policymakers to draft new rising sea level policy: Enhanced Action on Adaptation: Section II, Subsection 25 of the Cancun Accord. Recently, Dr. Terry created a GIS map pinning videos created by youth 18 to 30 that focus on environmental issues around the world. The project is called the Youth Climate Report.
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. For the past few years, he has been heading film workshops with indigenous youth in various countries, 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 2022 he added a Planetary Health Film Lab in Ecuador and the Ghana Youth Video Programme, followed by presenting the films at COP27 in November 2022.
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.