Minda Martin

Minda Martin has been making personal narrative and documentary films since the early 1990s. Her breakout film was Mother's Heritage (1995) where she took to the camera as a political act to represent the kinds of people she grew up with, working poor white families in the American southwest. Martin's first narrative short film, a little ballad (1998) would continue a theme in most of Martin's work which is mother daughter relationship. The film details the differing perspectives of a mother and her daughter who both utilize the radio as a tool for escapism. Martin's first feature work is the documentary, a.k.a. Kathe (2000) which garnered her two awards and various festival screenings and critical praise. Martin returned to short narrative with Monsoon St.,'77 (2006) and earned a Best Narrative Short film award and competitive international film screenings. Martin's second feature film and her most prominent work was Free Land (2009). The film traces Martin's immediate family's experience with poverty to the forced Cherokee relocation in the 1800s. The film includes archival media, creative writing, dramatic reenactments of historical documents as well as family artifacts, recordings and interviews. She received two awards, critical praise, and numerous festival screenings. In 2012, Martin would make her third narrative short film, The Long Distance Operator, for the omnibus feature documentary Far From Afghanistan that was inspired by the French new wave omnibus documentary Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam, 1967) by Chris Marker. Martin's segment casts war veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan to explore their emotions associated with using drone technology. Martin turned to personal documentary films from 2015-2020 in which she produced a short documentary film, Cuba Cine Adentro for audiences in Eastern Cuba with America's Media Initiative. She collaborated with community partners and activists who participated in Seattle's freeway revolt that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s and made the feature film Ramps to Nowhere (2018) and the shorter version of that film Seattle Freeway Revolt (2021). Recently, Martin has been developing three feature films based on experiences from her life. Martin is a professor at University of Washington at Bothell in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.