Martha Wallner

Martha Wallner co-founded the Deep Dish TV Satellite Network and served as its coordinator for seven years, building one of the first systems for distributing community and independent video by satellite to public access stations across the country. Before that she was a member of the Paper Tiger TV collective for twelve years, producing critical media analysis programming that public access channels carried as a direct challenge to commercial television. She co-organized Xchange TV in the 1980s, packaging and distributing Nicaraguan video in response to U.S. military intervention in Central America, and served as advocacy director for the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers in the early 1990s. She later directed Berkeley Community Media, the public access station in Berkeley, California, and went on to serve as grassroots coordinator for the Media and Democracy Coalition.

Her career connected the experimental and activist traditions of independent video to the operational infrastructure of public access television, moving between production, distribution, advocacy, and station management in ways that few practitioners did across a single career.

Martha's work helped prove that public access channels were not just local outlets but nodes in a larger system for independent distribution, one that could carry community voices across the country when the satellite made it possible.