Lucas, Martin
Associate Professor Emeritus
E-mail: mluc@hunter.cuny.edu
Martin Lucas received a BFA in film production from New York University. He is a videomaker and media educator. His work spans the gamut from broadcast television to public access cable and art installation.
From his first film, Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet, a populist look at New York City’s fiscal crisis screened at the 1980 New York Film Festival, to more recent work such as Subway Outside, an exploration of where New Yorkers find culture made with Dutch conceptual artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk, Martin’s work speaks to an abiding interest in the urban and its relations of culture and communication.
Other works have focused on topics including the plight of Guatemalan Indians in the early 1980’s, aired on PBS and the AIDS drug-pricing scandal of the 90’s for ZDF German Television.
Martin was an early member of Paper Tiger Television and a producer of The Gulf Crisis TV Project, an exercise in global anti-war network-building using satellite, informal networks that offered Americans, via national PBS and public access cable an important space of debate at the time of the 1990 Gulf War.
Martin has worked and taught in a variety of community media institutions including Downtown Community Television, The Educational Video Center and Manhattan Neighborhood Network, where he was the DIrector of Technology.
From 2005 through 2007, Martin was a fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University, doing research on film and media distribution and the changing nature of the public sphere in the age of the Internet with Professor Pat Aufderheide, as part of the Ford Foundation’s Future of Public Media initiative. www.centerforsocialmedia.org
In 2008 Martin worked closely with Story Workshop, an NGO in Malawi, helping to develop a documentary production unit to cover food security issues and media relating to gender violence. www.storyworkshop.org
Martin currently teaches documentary and new media production in the Film and Media Studies Department at Hunter College, City University of New York, where he is the director of the Integrated Media Arts Program.