BIO

Martin Lucas is an artist, educator and media activist. His first film, Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet (1980, New York Film Festival) produced with James Gaffney and Jonathan Miller, was a look at the costs and effects of the 1970s bankruptcy of New York City. As a founding member of the Paper Tiger Television Collective, Martin was one of the producers of The Gulf Crisis Television Project in 1991. His work in television news included the first TV expose of the AIDS drug-pricing scandal for ZDF German Television. His media works looking at urban crisis and the militarization of culture including Earlier Incident, featured at the 2009 Niet Normaal Exhibition in Amsterdam and Treatment Plan, featured at the 2011 Videoart.net Festival in New York. His work has been seen at locales including the Buena Vista Arts Center, San Francisco, the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, New York, The Knitting Factory, The New York Film Festival and the Ars Electronica, Linz.

Martin speaks regularly in the US and abroad on topics including media education, public art, video as a tool for social change, and documentary film. He has organized conferences on locative and other emerging media forms and development and has created digital media training programs in locales from Siberia to Southern Africa where Martin worked with Story Workshop in Malawi, Southern Africa, helping to develop production around gender violence, food security, and AIDS awareness, production that included the full-length feature film Okoma Atani, a look at the impact of AIDS on the life of a Malawian village. His most recent film Hiroshima Bound is a personal documentary that tracks the construction of America’s collective memory of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his own efforts as a visual artist to understand his connection to the Bomb.

Martin teaches video and new media production and theory in the Integrated Media Arts MFA Program of the Film and Media Studies Departmentat Hunter College, City University of New York. He has a BFA in film from New York University, and an MFA in Visual Art from the Vermont College of Fine Art.