Michael T. Martin is the Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor (Class of 1948) in Cinema and Media Studies at The Media School, Indiana University Bloomington. He has served as professor of Communication and Culture and American Studies and directed the Black Film Center/Archive for nine years until 2017. Martin founded and was former Editor-in-Chief of Black Camera, an International Film Journal published by Indiana University Press, and founded and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora book series with the same press. His research interests focus on diasporic and emigre cinematic formations, Latin, African, and Caribbean postcolonial cinemas, transnational migration, documentary practice, and redress social movements. He has delivered keynote addresses, including at the Memories of Slavery and Colonization: Historiography, Arts, and Museums conference.

Martin's extensive publications include African Cinema: Manifesto and Practice for Cultural Decolonization (with Gaston Kabore, Indiana University Press, 2023), From Street to Screen: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (with David C. Wall, 2020), The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present (2019), Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door (with David C. Wall and Marilyn Yaquinto, 2018), The Politics and Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man (with David C. Wall, 2015), Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence and Oppositionality (1995), and New Latin American Cinema (two volumes, 1995). Recent journal contributions appear in Black Camera, such as “The Future of African Filmmaking: A Roundtable Discussion” (2025) and “‘That’s the Difference, I Am Fully Engaged with Art’: Renee Baker on the Practice of Scoring Silent Film” (2023). He wrote and directed the award-winning documentary In the Absence of Peace and collaborated on the FESPACO & IMAGINE Film Institute project in Burkina Faso (2020-2022). A 2023 finalist for the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for the Moving Image and 2024 Wells Professorship recipient, Martin has profoundly influenced scholarship on Black and postcolonial cinemas through his editorial, authorial, and curatorial efforts.

Professional Email: martinmt@iu.edu