Event Details

The Inaugural Leola Johnson Lecture in Media and Cultural Studies will be delivered by filmmaker Brett Story

In this talk, Dr. Brett Story will explore the relationship between research and creative practice, arguing for filmmaking as a mode of radical inquiry. Sharing select scenes from her current project, a feature documentary charting the unlikely union organizing trajectory of a small band of Amazon workers in Staten Island, Story will discuss the geographies of scale, the precarity of current labor struggle, and the desire for the political as aesthetic form.

Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker, geographer and writer. Her films have screened in festivals around the world, including CPH-DOX, the Viennale, SXSW, True/False, and Sheffield DocFest. Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Length Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Brett’s most recent feature documentary, The Hottest August, was released to critical acclaim in March 2019. The film was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Brett is the author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America, and she holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Toronto. She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Sundance Institute, and MacDowell. Brett was named by Variety as one of 2019’s "10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch.”