The Cinema Studies Institute is delighted to share the news that Dr. Brett Story will be joining us as an Assistant Professor of Canadian Cinema and Media Praxis this fall. Dr. Story is an internationally-renown scholar and artist whose work straddles professional practice and multi-disciplinary scholarship. She is director of three award-winning feature-length documentaries, including Land of Destiny (2010) on the environmental crises and economic struggles in Sarnia, Ontario, Prison in 12 Landscapes (2016) on the carceral logics of modern American culture (which played at over 50 international film festivals), and The Hottest August (2019), a mosaic documentary on global warming and the rise of authoritarianism, which won numerous awards and was named by Variety, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Globe and Mail, and other prestigious publications as one of the 10 best films of 2019.
Dr. Story, who earned a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Toronto in 2015, is also author of Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and numerous scholarly essays in Geography and Media Studies, including the recent essays “How Does It End? Story as Property Form” and “Four Propositions on True Crime and Abolition” co-written with Pooja Rangan, which is part of a book in progress on documentary media and abolitionism. She has won numerous prestigious fellowships and grants—including a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship—and is currently working on “Untitled Labour Union Documentary” on the efforts to unionize at the Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island, which she will complete in the fall, and a film on the cultural critic and novelist John Berger. Prior to joining the Cinema Studies Institute, Dr. Story taught in the Image Arts Program at Toronto Metropolitan University. In winter 2023, Dr. Story will be teaching CIN370H1S: Canadian Cinemas: Experiments in Nonfiction and CIN 440H1S: Carceral Screens and Abolitionist Cinema.
Please join us in welcoming Brett Story to the Institute when she arrives!