Dr. Marchessault is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University, where she held the Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization (2003-2013). She was the co-founder of Future Cinema Lab and the inaugural Director of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology Research at York University. In 2012, Professor Marchessault was awarded a prestigious Trudeau Fellowship to pursue her curatorial and public art research around the problem of sustainable development. She has (co)curated numerous large-scale public art exhibitions in Toronto and beyond—Being on Time (2001), The Leona Drive Project (2009), Museum for the End of the World (2012) and Land|Slide, Possible Futures (2013) which are all site specific exhibitions. Land|Slide was named one of the best exhibitions in Canada in 2013 by Canadian Art Magazine, and was invited to be part of the Shenzhen/Hong-Kong Architectural Biennale (2013-2014).

For over the past five years she has also worked with researchers and curators to uncover some of missing film experiments pioneered at Expo 67. Her latest co-edited anthology (with M. K. Gagnon) Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (McGill-Queen’s Press, Fall 2014) documents these multiscreen events. She is also involved in on-going archival research related to Edmund Carpenter and Marshall Mcluhan’s media think-tank and journal Explorations in the early 1950s at the University of Toronto under the rubric of the Explorations Seminar. The anthology Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (with M. Darroch, McGill-Queen’s 2014) examines new models of the media city. Marchessault is the author of ten monographs and (co)edited volumes, and over fifty articles in books, journals and catalogues devoted to cinema, new media, and contemporary art. She is a past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada and a co-founder of the Future Cinema Lab devoted to creating ‘new stories for new screens’. She has lectured widely, and held faculty positions at McGill University and Ryerson University. Monographs in preparation: Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecology (2017, MIT Press); and Archival Imaginary: Creative Approaches to Digital Memory. Collections in preparation include The Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema (with Will Straw, Oxford) and Process Cinema: HandMade Film in the Digital Age (with S. MacKenzie McGill-Queen’s). Exhibition in preparation includes a site specific engagement with revitalization in Toronto’s Lawrence Heights, Houses on Pengarth (2016-2019).