Mark Terry

Mark Terry has been making documentary films for more than 25 years. His first film, Clive Barker: The Art of Horror, was made with the National Film Board of Canada and released by Paramount Pictures.. Mark first established Hollywood Canada Productions in 1983 as a publishing house for his national controlled circulation publication, Hollywood Canada Magazine. Five years later, he bought Toronto's historic Bayview Playhouse theatre and began producing live theatre there and on Broadway and London's West End. Hollywood Canada's attention then turned to feature film production as Mark worked in Hollywood for five years producing the films Project Genesis, Replikator, Silent Lies, George B. (the first Canadian-produced feature to participate in the Official Competition of the Sundance Film Festival) and The Man in the Iron Mask. When he returned to Canada, he began to focus on television production: documentary series and one-offs. Mark's documentary directorial debut was with the Royal Canadian Regiment as he served with soldiers in Kosovo to make his documentary We Stand On Guard. The film, starring Gordon Pinsent, chronicled the first 100 years of the Canadian military. Mark produced, wrote and directed the film that played each Remembrance Day on Global Television for five consecutive years. Mark created and wrote the documentary specials Earth's Natural Wonders and Mysteries of Sacred Sites selling them to Programming Director Dan Russell at the Discovery Channel (US) beginning a series of science and nature documentaries that would become his trademark in future years. Mark also created the popular documentary series Shop With Me, Table for Two and Today's Talent Time, all for Global Television. The success of these documentary projects earned him an invitation from the Government of China to produce a series of documentary films for the Hong Kong Museum of History in Kowloon, China. Mark lived in Hong Kong for a year producing a series of films for the museum's permanent exhibit. Mark's adventurous spirit has brought him to exotic locations across the globe, but none more impressive to him than the polar regions. After visiting Alaska in the mid-1990s, Mark fell in love with the majestic beauty of the landscape. Subsequent trips to the Arctic in Canada and in Alaska inspired Mark to get involved with northern research programs. Today, Mark is a Fellow Member of The Explorers' Club, a 115-year-old organization comprised of the world's greatest explorers. Mark has been awarded the club's highest honour, the Stefansson Medal, for his work with the United Nations in presenting his films The Antarctica Challenge and The Polar Explorer at the climate change conferences in Copenhagen (2009) and Cancun (2010). These films also won back-to-back Audience Choice Awards at the American Conservation Film Festival in 2010 and 2011. As a Fellow member of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Mark continues to document and lecture about the environmental issues affecting the world's polar regions. Today Mark has earned his PhD in multilinear, interactive documentary film production using Geographic Information System mapping. This remediation of the documentary film has been coined a Geo-Doc, a data delivery system currently used by the environmental policymakers of the United Nations and UNESCO. His book on the subject - The Geo-Doc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change - was released 2020 by Palgrave Macmillan and is available on Amazon: shorturl.at/DIRSU. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University in Toronto. He also Contract Faculty at York University and Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON, Canada.