Martin Lucas is an actively engaged media artist with a critical perspective and a documentary bent who works in an art world context as well as in alternative and broadcast media.

His work, from his first film, a populist look at New York City’s fiscal crisis screened at the 1980 New York Film Festival to more recent work including Subway Outside, a collaboration with Dutch conceptual artist Jeanne van Heeswijk speaks to an abiding interest in the urban and its relations of culture and communication. Other work includes Getting into Maastricht, produced at the Jan van Eyck Center for Design in the Netherlands and a four-part series for Discovery Network ‘Great Writers, Great Cities, shot in London, Mexico City and the US, featuring authors including Luc Sante, Carl Hiaasen and Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Social issue works have focused on topics including the plight of Guatemalan Indians in the early 1980’s, aired on PBS, and AIDS drug-pricing scandal in the 90’s, aired on ZDF Germany. The Gulf Crisis TV Project an exercise in global network-building using satellite, informal networks, offered Americans, via national PBS and public access an important space of debate at the time of the 1990 Gulf War. Other work with Paper Tiger TV included museum installation art and...

Other work includes image-based performance pieces in locales including PS122 and The Knitting Factory in New York, and an abandoned fortress in the Netherlands. Works in this series are preoccupied with the legacy of militarism in modern life.

Martin speaks regularly on media issues in the US and abroad, addressing topics including media education, public art, video as a tool for social change, and the history of the documentary in academic, artistic, and professional contexts.
His research and work with state-of-the-art production techniques including satellite, wireless web-casting, and digital imaging, speak to a commitment to getting knowledge and technology into the hands of students, individual artists and community producers.
He has taught film and video production as well as new media at Fordham University, Brooklyn college, The Educational Video Center and Hunter College , CUNY and has developed media programs in locales including Armenia and Siberia.

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