Lydia Dean Pilcher | Storming the Apocalypse: Cultural Power and Facing the Anthropocene

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Abstract: How does culture mediate perception of a phenomenon that exceeds human scale? Lydia Dean Pilcher—filmmaker, cultural strategist, and educator at Columbia Climate School—approaches this challenge by investigating a dominant cultural identity based on high energy use and extractive wealth. Understood through Timothy Morton's concept of the hyperobject, climate change resists conventional representation: it is distributed across time and space in ways that destabilize linear narrative, political discourse, and cognitive models of risk. The result is a persistent economic power gap between a data-driven scientific consensus and public engagement.

In this talk, Pilcher will present work from several interconnected projects that address this gap. These include her teachings and learnings from an interdisciplinary graduate course, Climatic Change: Storytelling Arts, Zeitgeist & Our Future, gathering artists, scientists, policymakers, and global thinkers to create compelling climate solutions in popular culture (film, television, digital media, and creative writing); and Storming the Apocalypse: Disasters, Culture & Risk Perception, a research collaboration, with meteorologist Andrew Kruczkiewicz at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.This project innovates a paradigm-shifting toolkit using storytelling arts, systems thinking, neuroscience, and environmental humanities to bridge the gap between traditional climate science communications and low climate risk perception. around disaster preparedness. Through multi-phase, interdisciplinary collaborations with communities and tUN Climate Change, Pilcher and Kruczkiewicz are now in the process of co-creating four cultural case studies in New York, Kampala, Bangkok, and Rio de Janeiro.

Selected as a Plan for Accelerated Solutions in the UN Climate Change COP30 Action Agenda (2025), Pilcher’s research and narrative strategies position culture not as a sideshow to policy, but as a precondition for its legitimacy and impact. In this light, cultural infrastructure can be applied as a hyperobject of imagination across systems including governments and multilateral diplomacy. 

 

About the Speaker

Lydia Dean Pilcher is a filmmaker, cultural strategist, and educator whose work explores storytelling arts and popular culture toward climate solutions. A two-time Emmy Award–winning and Academy Award–nominated producer, she has produced over forty feature films and series and works internationally across the U.S., India, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Her directing credits include A Call to Spy and the climate themed films Radium Girls and Homing Instinct, a multi-screen installation inspired by Octavia's Brood (currently on exhibition at MoCa Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art through August 5, 2026}.

Pilcher has an extensive track record creating innovative multi-stakeholder collaborations to drive narrative change in the entertainment industry, working with studios and the creative unions and guilds. In 2024 she co-founded Global Rise: Stories for the Future to bring her academic work to professional creatives and social amplifiers working on the front lines to build new muscles for story strategies and long-term thinking.

Pilcher co-founded the Producers Guild of America Sustainability Task Force and co-convenes Roll Call, 60 companies and organizations working around climate storytelling in the entertainment industries. She has taught cultural strategy at NYU Tisch Graduate Film in a course she designed: The Audience is in Revolt; and is an advisor to The Hollywood Climate Summit and The Climate Imaginarium at Governor’s Island Arts. Pilcher serves on the 2024-2026 Film & TV Steering Committee of the UN Climate Change Initiative, Entertainment and Culture for Climate Action (ECCA). 

This Workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from an anonymous donor, former Fellows, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.

Related Events