Bio

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Martin started as a print editor, correcting and refining restroom graffiti on the walls of St. Joseph, Missouri’s Central High School. After post-graduate work in food conveyance and interior relocation, he served as apprentice editor on two feature films and then at National Geographic Television in Washington, DC. Here, he advanced to assistant and then film editor. This classic apprenticeship taught him not only the nuances of rhythm, continuity, and the role of audio — earning him a national Emmy for sound editing — but also the ins and outs of narrative structure. He also learned here how to speak of himself in the third person.

Since then, working on Avid, Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere nonlinear systems, he has cut reality, documentaries and true crime for CNBC, NBC, PBS, OWN, Discovery, Investigation Discovery, TLC, A&E, Animal Planet, Showtime, SciFi Channel and many other networks. He has done museum work for the Smithsonian Institution, the National Portrait Gallery, The National Park Service, The Oklahoma Bombing Memorial and others. His commercial clients include Ogilvy & Mather, Time-Life Video, CableOne and various political campaigns. Corporate and event clients include the Institute of Food TechnologistsAmerican Federation of Teachers, Pfizer Pharmaceutical, the Democratic National Committee, the Global Tech Summit, the Veterans Administration, and the American Diabetes Association. He has also cut for government agencies too numerous — or secret — to mention and award-winning fiction films for friends, college students and aspiring auteurs.

Martin spent the summer of 2003 in Rome cutting Iceman: Hunt for a Killer for Discovery Television, the summer of 2004 discovering Chicago and the summer of 2005 searching for his keys. Desert Bayou, his summer project for 2006 & 2007 enjoyed a national theatrical run in the fall of 2007 and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary in the Motion Picture Category. And They Came to Chicago: The Italian American Legacy, 2007’s winter project won five Silver Tellys including one for editing and aired for a while pretty much every other day on WTTW. Summer 2008, Martin co-produced, cut, mixed and color corrected Good People, a twisty little half-hour fiction film which played to laughs, gasps and thunderous applause at film festivals around the country, eventually finding its way back home to the Chicago International Film Festival where Martin promptly proceeded to lose his glasses. The winters of 2008 & 2009 were partially spent enriching young minds at Columbia College, Chicago. Much of 2010 & 2011 were spent cutting the feature-length, festival favorite, documentary, The Grand Deception. 2012 started with his first full-length fiction feature film, Between Western and California, a portrait of a young artist in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. No, it’s not about Martin. 2012 rolled into 2013 filled with perfect days as Martin cut, uh, Perfect Day, a beautiful short narrative written and directed by the Jeff Award-winning, Derrick Sanders. It was an official selection at twenty festivals and won major awards at five of them. Somewhere in here, Martin found time to cut five episodes of American Greed for CNBC.

Much of 2014 and 2015 were spent cutting various shows at Harpo Studios for OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network. She says, “Hi.”