Martha Colburn is a filmmaker well-known for her animation films, which are created through puppetry, collage, and paint on glass techniques. She has made over forty films since 1994. 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.”

Colburn’s films examine the complex dynamics of contemporary life, politics, and society. Colburn works for years on a single project, and her films result from intensive research and meticulously rendered stop-motion animations. Through photography, collage, painting, and puppetry, Colburn uses handmade aesthetics to create touching, personal, and unforgettable narratives. Her film Metamorfoza was included in the 2017 B3 Biennale of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, Germany. Colburn is a Creative Capital grant recipient for Western Wild...or how I found Wanderlust and met Old Shatterhand, a densely textured documentary about the making of a film about the famed German author Karl May. She is a frequent featured artist at the Sundance Film Festival, where she initiated the New Frontiers film and video installation program in 2007 with her film Meet Me in Wichita. Colburn was also a featured artist at the opening of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, with a live performance of films and music. Her work is in the collections at MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and her film Triumph of the Wild is permanently on show at the Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany.