RIP Paige Martínez

Paige Martínez, 52, an accomplished documentary filmmaker and a former member of the Austin film community, died on November 24 in Las Vegas, NM, where she was a graduate student in the Department of Media Arts & Technology at Highlands University. The cause was medical complications from a long-standing illness.

Martínez came to Austin to work with Hector Galán on Los Mineros, his film about Mexican-American copper miners and their fight for equal wages, which aired on PBS' American Experience series. Before she left Austin in 1997, she completed Words of Our Ancients, an hour-length PBS documentary on the Hopi people's efforts to retain cultural sovereignty during the late 19th century that screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Among her other work was In Service to America, a one-hour segment for the PBS series, America's War on Poverty which received a Columbia School of Journalism DuPont Award, and El Senador, a biography about New Mexico's first Mexican American senator.

Martínez was a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, in Filmmaking. A remembrance page for her has been created.