Martha Wallner ~ Curriculum Vitae
Bio: Martha Wallner has been an active builder, sustainer and defender of progressive media and social justice organizations for over twenty years. She is currently the Media & Communications Coordinator for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children based in San Francisco. She gained her early work experience under the Federal job training program CETA at Centro de Cambio in San Francisco’s Mission District. She then joined the Paper Tiger TV Collective in New York City and produced programs in collaboration with activists, artists and academics including: Richie Perez, Martha Rosler, Flo Kennedy, Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, William Kunstler and Thulani Davis.
In 1985 she co-founded the Deep Dish TV Grassroots Satellite Network and co-produced a number of series’ including the Gulf Crisis TV Project which was broadcast internationally. In 1993 she became the Advocacy Director for the 5000 member Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers/AIVF. There she co-founded the Media Democracy in Action Consortium to fight the right-wing assault on public broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also active in the national effort to win better provisions for community media and equitable access to new communications technologies in the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Martha became the director of Berkeley Community Media in 1996, the public access cable television station in Berkeley, CA and an active member of Media Alliance. She was on the planning team that organized public hearings on Media Consolidation in San Francisco in 2003 and the Public FCC Hearing on Localism in Monterey, CA in 2004.
For the past decade, Martha has operated a consulting practice serving progressive media organizations and the funders that support them. In 2006 she co-facilitated the launch of the Media & Democracy Coalition made up of 33 member organizations including Free Press, Consumer’s Union, the Leadership Council on Civil Rights and the National Hispanic Media Coalition.
Over the years Martha has designed and led many workshops on media activism and advocacy at convenings organized by organizations such as the Alliance for Community Media, Prometheus Radio Project and the U.S. Social Forum. She was an invited guest and presenter at the Cuban International Film Festival, The Encuentro Latinoamericano de Video in Cochabamba, Bolivia and the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. She has taught courses on media policy and civil society at New York University and the University of San Francisco and frequently lectures in college classes from Hunter College CUNY to U.C. Berkeley. She served on the boards of Scribe Video (Philadelphia), and Media Alliance (SF) and the advisory boards of the United Church of Christ Media Empowerment Project (DC) and the Center for Media Justice (Oakland, CA).
