Mary Martins is a British-Nigerian documentary animator and experimental filmmaker from London. She produces multi-layered, abstract documentaries that focus on socially engaged themes, representing the experiences of marginalised groups. She also uses animation to celebrate her own African heritage, which is still underrepresented within industry.

Her practice-based PhD research is exploring the history and journey of the enslaved Africans that returned from Salvador, Brazil to Lagos, Nigeria, using animation as an autoethnographic method of investigation. She is particularly interested in using animation to interrogate the aspects of colonial history that have resulted in the exclusion of certain stories, and how animation can produce a living archive that connects the past with the present.

Mary graduated from the Royal College of Art on the MA Documentary Animation pathway. Her an animated documentary, which explores the youth knife crime epidemic in London won the CIRCA and Dazed Class of 2022 award.