Timothy M. Martin, a longtime resident of Chicago, died unexpectedly Feb. 27 at his home in Forestville, Calif.
He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1987 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he concentrated on Time Arts and Film. In 2001, he received a Master of Fine Arts in Time Arts and Ethnography from the University of Chicago. His ethnographic fieldwork included many trips to Haiti.
From 1987 to 1993, Martin was the director of media services at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, where he professionalized the department and launched video projects that drew upon his ethnographic and technical skills. His film projects during that time included creating short films on Haiti and a video exploring the situation of persons living with HIV/AIDS in Cuba. The film on Cuba was one of the first to document the situation of Cubans with HIV who were confined for life to live in "sidatorios" in Cuba.
He left his position with law school to be a volunteer with the Peace Corps. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1993 to 1995 in the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, a Portuguese-speaking island nation off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa.
When he returned to the United States, Martin took a series of jobs in e-learning and corporate education. He developed a strong vision of effective skills education through the latest and most effective training media, and became well known in the e-learning community.
He was the business unit manager and an account executive for IBM/Catapult Software Training, where he worked from 1995 to 1999. Martin was an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago from 1996 to 2006, where he enjoyed working with talented students. He was an e-learning consultant from 1999 to 2003 with Allen Interactions, Inc., and the director of business development for the eLearning Guild from 2004 to 2010. He worked with Strategic Learning Development for Tandem Learning in 2010 and was director of business development for the Elearning! Media Group in 2011.
At the time of his death, he was preparing a new project on global legal skills education, bringing together his educational background, interests and vision.
Martin saw himself as an ethnographer, artist, filmmaker and lifelong student of human nature. He loved to travel around the world, taking his last foreign trip into Mexico in late December 2011. He enjoyed living in the woods of northern California, where he had built a home with his former partner, Mario Guerra, and where they raised Martin's son, Andrew Martin.
Martin is survived by a son (Andrew Martin), nephew (Kevin Gurtowski), brother (James), sister-in-law (Mary O'Dell Martin), father (Donald Martin) and mother (Alice Martin).