Events
2025-2026 Events
Events will be added here as they are planned, so please check back often! Events will also be posted on PlanitPurple, Northwestern's event feed.
KEYNOTE: Filmmaker Brett Story
Wed., February 11, 2026
Time and location to be announced
Free and public welcome!
Brett Story is a filmmaker, writer, and geographer based out of Toronto. Story's keynote will be paired with a screening of her most recent feature documentary, UNION (2024; co-directed with Stephen Maing), on February 12, 2026 (7:00 pm at the Block Museum of Art). UNION chronicles the extraordinary efforts of a grassroots union campaign at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York.
This event is the Public Humanities keynote and a Critical Conversation in the Humanities of the Kaplan Humanities Institute.
About Brett Story
Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker and writer whose work pushes the formal boundaries of political cinema. Her 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. She holds a Ph.D. in geography and is currently an assistant professor of Media Praxis at the University of Toronto.
Past Events 2025-2026
The Ethics of Community-Engaged Humanities
Fri., November 7, 2025
12:00 - 1:30 pm CT
Zoom webinar
Free and public welcome!
Scholarly work that engages with communities beyond the academy raises ethical questions on both a theoretical and practical level. How can scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences foster meaningful, mutually beneficial community partnerships? Join us for a discussion with three experienced practitioners who will share their perspectives on the challenges and rewards of community-engaged scholarship.
We’re excited to welcome in conversation Noa Michaela Fields (Public Programs Manager at the Poetry Foundation), Kantara Souffrant (Senior Director of Community Dialogue & Adult Programs at the Milwaukee Art Museum), and Michael Metzger (Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts at Northwestern's Block Museum of Art), with moderator Ruth Martin Curry (Program Administrator of Community-Engaged Teaching, Learning, and Research at Northwestern's Center for Civic Engagement).
About the panelists
Noa Micaela Fields is a trans poet with hearing aids who composes by mishearing. Her debut poetry book E is out this winter from Nightboat Books, and her writing has also recently appeared in Anomaly, Antiphony, Jacket2, Oxford Electronic Music Handbook, Poem-of-the-Day, Sixty Inches from Center, Tripwire, and Tyger Quarterly. She is the recipient of fellowships from Zoeglossia and Disability Lead. She lives in Chicago, where she curates public programs at the Poetry Foundation. (Website: doyounoapoet.com.)
Dr. Kantara Souffrant is the Senior Director of Community Dialogue and Adult Programs at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she oversees art experiences rooted in vulnerability, feeling interconnected, and building sustainable community partnerships. Souffrant is a Haitian-American artist-scholar who brings her passion for community engagement, dialogue, and facilitation to her work as a performer, educator, and community member. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern, with certificates in Critical Theory, African and Diaspora Studies, and Teaching. Her scholarship examines visual and performance art in the Black Atlantic, Black feminist aesthetics, and museum pedagogy. She is co-editor, with Dr. Marianna Pegno, of Institutional Change for Museums: A Practical Guide to Creating Polyvocal Spaces which demonstrates how museums can enact institutional change by implementing systematic and structural approaches to anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-elitist practices.
Dr. Michael Metzger is the Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts at the Block Museum at Northwestern. In his scholarship, critical writing, film programming, and curation, Michael seeks to foster community, knowledge, and experience through the moving image. His curatorial efforts include installations by artists Paul Chan, Isaac Julien, Sky Hopinka, and Dario Robleto. With J.P. Sniadecki (Radio/Television/Film), Michael co-leads the Climate Crisis and Media Arts Working Group, supported by Northwestern's Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Michael holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University, and he has worked as an educator since 2007, teaching courses on the history of images and information and digital media production, and lecturing on environmental media, desktop aesthetics and “imperfect cinema.”
Moderator
Dr. Ruth Martin Curry is a staff member at the Center for Civic Engagement, where she supports graduate students and faculty in their community-engaged teaching, learning, and research. She studied philosophy and literature at the University of Chicago and at Northwestern, where she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies. At Northwestern, she’s taught and supported a number of undergraduate and graduate courses connecting humanistic study and civic engagement for Chicago Field Studies, Philosophy, and Asian American Studies.