KAREN MARTINEZ

KAREN MARTINEZ is a dual national UK/Trinidad & Tobago filmmaker, with a degree in Film, Video & Photographic Arts from The University of Westminster, London.

After university, Karen worked in Trinidad for a number of years producing and directing several Caribbean TV series, including the popular Gayelle, as well as Body Beat, which both won National Media Awards.

Later, Karen returned to the UK and directed two documentaries: Kaiso For July 27, for the Channel 4 series 'South', which looked at Trinidad and Tobago one year after an attempted muslim coup, using calypso to help explore the story; and Chutney in yuh Soca, for the Channel 4 music series Black Trax, about an Indian-soca musical hybrid in the Caribbean.

More recently, she made a short film about a theatre project that works with trafficked women called Marginal Voices and the lyrical film Dark and Unaccustomed Words based on the work of British/Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo.

After Mas, made with financial assistance from the Trinidad & Tobago Film Company, is her first foray into drama, and she is now developing a feature film script, a psychological drama / thriller set in the UK and Trinidad, provisionally entitled Blanchicheuse.

She has also just been awarded another grant from the Trinidad & Tobago Film Company to make a new lyrical documentary-essay film, Dreams in Transit, that examines the meaning of "home". Shooting will commence in early 2014.