Brett Story
Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies Institute
Brett Story is an assistant professor with the Cinema Studies Institute. She is an award-winning Toronto-based 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.
Story’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, where it was described as “a cinematic gift, an intellectual challenge, an emotional adventure.” The Hottest August was broadcast on PBS’ Independent Lens in 2020 and was featured in over a dozen best of the year lists, including in Rolling Stone, Vulture, and Vanity Fair magazines.
Story is also 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.
Story was named by Variety as one of 2019’s “10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch.” Her interests across the fields of documentary and critical theory are expansive, and include experimental cinema and essay films, political geography, critical theory, racial capitalism and Marxist political economy.