Martin Spinelli

Martin Spinelli began a career in radio as a teenager. In his twenties as a reporter, anchor and programme maker in Buffalo, New York, he produced award-winning news features for public radio as well as the nationally acclaimed literary series LINEbreak. In the mid-1990s he produced cutting-edge pieces heard on innovative stations around the world, in addition to BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. Both his benchmark radio art series Radio Radio and LINEbreak are included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York while all of his radio work and writing are archived in the Martin Spinelli Collection at the University at Buffalo Library.

Martin holds degrees from the University of Sussex and Virginia Tech as well as a PhD from Buffalo. He was the founder of the Academic Radio Program at the City University of New York at Brooklyn College where he produced the AIDS-informational soap Welcome to America broadcast on Radio Africa International. His many essays about media art and history have been published in anthologies as well as journals like Postmodern Culture, Convergence and Object.

In September 2006 Martin's life was transformed when his wife was killed and his son nearly killed by a lorry driver who fell asleep at the wheel. Martin's first book, the memoir After the Crash, tells the story of their recovery. He now writes inspirational stories and is a part-time lecturer in Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. But his most important and rewarding occupation is father to the most amazing boy in Britain, Lio Spinelli.