Colombian-American Futurist Martha Diaz (MD) is an award-winning social entrepreneur, media producer, educator, archivist, and curator dedicated to advancing social justice and equity through the power of Hip-Hop culture, media, technology, and storytelling. In 2010, MD founded the Hip-Hop Education Center and serves as the CEO, Chief Curator and Archivist. She has traversed the Hip-Hop entertainment industry, the public arts and education sector, and the academy over the past 30 years connecting and bridging initiatives across public and private cultural and educational institutions.
A highly accomplished global education thought leader, community organizer, and mentor, MD has substantial organizational, interpersonal, networking, and event-planning-production skills. Through her exhibitions, and publications of research reports, books, and curricula, she has chronicled and archived Hip-Hop history to preserve its cultural value and memory. In 2002, MD founded the highly acclaimed Hip-Hop Odyssey (H2O) International Film Festival, the first festival of its kind, and co-founded the Hip-Hop Association. She was invited to curate the first Hip-Hop film series presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and served as a guest curator at the Museum of the Moving Image and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. MD has produced and consulted on numerous media projects including, Where My Ladies At? by Leba Haber Rubinoff (2007), Black August: A Hip-Hop Concert by dream hampton (2010), Nas: Time Is Illmatic by One9 (2014), and Dear Mama by Allen Hughes (2023).
A graduate of New York University’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study and Tisch School of the Arts Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, MD has worked on archival projects with Parkwood Entertainment (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter), Tupac Shakur Estate, Ralph McDaniels Video Music Box Collection, The Paley Center for Media, and A&E’s Hip-Hop Treasures TV Series, to name a few. She has taught at NYU and Virginia State University(VSU), and was a visiting scholar at Virginia Union University. Among her fellowships, MD has served as a Senior Fellow at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation – National Museum of American History, A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholar at Columbia University, Nasir Jones Fellow at Harvard University, Inaugural Fellow at the Center for Creative & Entertainment Arts at VSU, and MacArthur Civic Media Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab. She’s an advisor and associate archivist and curator of The Hip Hop Museum.
