Description:

Dr. Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and geographer whose work pushes the formal boundaries of political cinema. Based in Toronto, where she is an Assistant Professor of Media Praxis at the University of Toronto, she has made films about carceral power, climate change, and labor movements. In this public talk, Dr. Story will discuss the role of community-engaged and research-informed storytelling in bridging academic and public audiences and in responding to pressing political questions of our time.  

Post-talk Q&A will be led by Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Assistant Professor, Radio/TV/Film. 

This event is the Public Humanities Keynote and a Critical Conversation in the Humanities of the Kaplan Humanities Institute.

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Paired with this keynote, Block Cinema will be screening UNION, Brett Story's most recent feature documentary.

Screening of UNION (2024)
February 12, 2026 (Thurs.)
7:00 pm
Block Museum of Art (40 Arts Circle Drive)

UNION (2024; co-directed with Stephen Maing) chronicles the extraordinary efforts of a grassroots union campaign at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York. Brett Story will introduce and discuss the film, including the decision to self-distribute a work that dared to challenge one of the most powerful companies in the contemporary media landscape. Story will be joined in discussion and Q&A with Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts at the Block Museum.

About Brett Story

Brett Story's films have screened in theatres and festivals internationally, including at Sundance, New York Film Festival, CPH-DOX, and IDFA. She is the director of four feature films, including The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and The Hottest August (2019), and the author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. The Hottest August was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and was called one of the best documentary films of 2019 by Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, among others. Her most recent feature documentary, Union (2024), co-directed with Stephen Maing, premiered at Sundance 2024 where it won a Special Jury Prize. Union has screened at over 100 festivals worldwide and was shortlisted for an Academy Award.

Brett has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Sundance Institute, and was named one of Variety’s 10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch. In both 2020 and 2025 she was nominated for a Cinema Eye Award for Best Director.