Indigenous Storytelling In Cyberspace: IM4, The First Indigenous Virtual Reality Lab In Canada

Loretta Todd is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning filmmaker known for powerful, visual storytelling. Her films have screened at the Sundance Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival (San Francisco), Yamagata Film Festival, ImagineNative, and the Museum of Modern Art - to name a few. She has received many prestigious honours and awards, including a Rockefeller Fellowship to New York University, attendance at the Sundance Scriptwriter’s Lab, Special Jury Citation (TIFF) and Mayor's Award for Media Arts (City of Vancouver). She recently was recognized with a Innovation Award from Women In Film. In demand as a writer and lecturer, Ms. Todd has spoken at the United Nations, MOMA, and at Global Perspectives and Cultural Hybridity (2005 Venice Biennale). Ms. Todd is also a successful producer of children’s programming for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN – Canada), including the award-winning Coyote’s Crazy Smart Science Show, about Indigenous science. And she produced, directed and wrote Skye and Chang, a sci-fi martial arts drama series, premiering the pilot on APTN, which also won the Best Short Drama Award at the 38th American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco. She recently created Fierce Girls, a webseries and transmedia project about two Indigenous teen superheroes and she will soon direct her first feature. Known for using lyrical, expressionistic imagery combined with strong storytelling skills and talents, she tells truths that are haunting, funny and real. What makes Ms. Todd an exceptional filmmaker is her imagination and her fearlessness. Some say she sees into the hearts and minds of the subjects, actors and characters in her films.