Michael T. Martin is a professor of cinema and media studies, as well as adjunct professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies at Indiana University. Martin's research interests include diasporic cinema, Latin, African, and Caribbean postcolonial cinema, documentary practice, and redress social movements. He has previously taught at Princeton University, Wayne State University, and Bowling Green State University.

Martin has written and edited eight published books, as well as being a frequent contributor to journals in his field. Books include Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, the two-volume series New Latin American Cinema, Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States: On Reparations for Slavery, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies, and Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present.

Journals to which Martin has contributed include Africa Today, Third Text, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, and Research in African Literatures.

At Indiana University, Martin previously served as the director of the Black Film Center & Archive for nine years before leaving the position in 2017. During this time he founded the scholarly journal Black Camera, of which he remains editor-in-chief. For Black Camera Martin has interviewed filmmakers and scholars such as Bridgett M. Davis, Dany Laferrière, Stanley Nelson, and Ava DuVernay.

In addition to his prolific writing and editing, he also directed the 1988 documentary In the Absence of Peace during his time at Princeton University. The documentary looks at post-revolutionary Nicaraguan society and the social ramifications of the forty year of dictatorship on the Latin American nation.