Martha Diaz

Martha Diaz (MD) is a community organizer, media producer, archivist, curator, and educator. MD is one of Women’s eNews distinguished 21 Leaders for the 21st Century whose work has traversed the hip-hop entertainment industry, the public arts and education sector, and the academy over the last 25 years. Her passion is advancing human rights and transforming communities through Hip-Hop media, technology, and social entrepreneurship. She has associate produced and consulted on numerous hip-hop documentaries including, Where My Ladies At? by Leba Haber Rubinoff (2007), Black August: A Hip-Hop Concert by Dream Hampton (2010), and Nas: Time Is Illmatic by One9 (2014). In 2002, MD founded the highly acclaimed Hip-Hop Odyssey (H2O) International Film Festival, the first and largest festival of its kind. She was invited to curate the first Hip-Hop movie series presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and served as a guest curator at the Museum of the Moving Image. In 2010, MD formed the Hip-Hop Education Center to research, cultivate and formalize the field of hip-hop-based education. Through her publications of research reports, books, and curricula, she has chronicled hip-hop history to preserve its cultural value and memory. A graduate of New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, MD has worked on archival projects with Parkwood Entertainment (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter), Tupac Shakur Estate, and National Jazz Museum in Harlem, to name a few. She was a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History – Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Fellow at Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Program in Social Entrepreneurship, Curator/Scholar at The Schomburg Center, Community Scholar at Columbia University, and Nasir Jones Fellow at Harvard University. MD is currently completing the New School Creation Fellowship at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education.