Meet Me in Wichita · Martha Colburn

A self-taught filmmaker, Martha Colburn began making films with Super 8 cameras, a splicer, projector, and stock footage she bought at a government surplus sale in her hometown of Baltimore. From this and other found footage, Colburn went on to make over 35 corrupt collage animation films that poke fun at American pop culture; she calls the films "psycho spazzumentaries."

On Meet Me in Wichita, the artist said, “It started out with the idea of bin Laden: paralleling the search for Osama bin Laden and the demonization of one particular character with the witch trials, and kind of the fanatic idea of fear and evil. . . I placed Osama bin Laden into The Wizard of Oz. . . I mean, it's a documentary of something that people can write about but there's no way to film it, really, other than animation. The same way they used animation to illustrate things in outer space, or before they had microscopes ... And yeah, they're usually political, and not the softest-edged ideas, you know? They're challenging and they're not presented in some kind of a soft way.”

The artist was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and lives and works in Amsterdam, New York and Los Angeles. She has a BA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MA equivalent from Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunst (Royal Academy of Art) in Holland.