Twenty-four years of making space for artists in film & media.
Motion Media Arts Center is a nonprofit on one mission — remove the financial and structural barriers that keep talented voices out of film, photo, and media arts. We build the studios, run the classes, and host the showcases that filmmakers, photographers, and artists using technology for expression in Austin actually need. Twenty-four years in, still serving the same mission with the same fire.
A nonprofit built at scale.
Film and media remain some of the most expensive art forms. Cameras. Lighting. Studios. Software. Editors. Without access, the people who get to tell stories are only the people who could already afford to.
That math has shaped the industry for decades — and it's shaped whose work gets seen, whose stories get told, and whose experiences get represented on screen.
We don't believe diversifying film and media happens by chance. It happens when WE build intentional, community-rooted pathways into the work. So we build them. Equitable education. Hands-on training. Affordable studio access. Public exhibition platforms. The full stack of what a working artist needs to make and show work — without choosing between rent and a reel.
Twenty-four years in.
Cinemaker Co-op is born.
Three filmmakers — Barna Kantor, Kris DeForest, and Heyd Fontenot — start the Austin Cinemaker Co-op out of a garage to promote small-gauge filmmaking. Early members include Guillermo del Toro and Lee Daniel. The grassroots, DIY ethos that still shapes everything we do today.
The kids show up.
Anne Goetzmann Kelley approaches Kantor with a bigger idea — young people from every neighborhood in Austin deserve the tools to tell their own stories. Together they found the Center for Young Cinema, the first year-round film school for children under 18 in the Southwest. Free youth summer camps begin that same year — built on the conviction that who gets to pick up a camera shapes who gets to be seen. They've never stopped.
Texas's first media arts center.
Cinemaker Co-op and Center for Young Cinema merge in May to form Motion Media Arts Center, with Anne Goetzmann Kelley stepping in as Director of Education. The timing is everything — digital cameras, nonlinear editing, and the internet are about to rewire what storytelling can be. MMAC is built to open that door wide: a nonprofit dedicated to making sure underrepresented and underserved voices aren't left out of the revolution, but are right there at the center of it. Texas finally has a home for community-rooted media arts.
Austin School of Film opens.
MMAC launches Austin School of Film — a community film school offering low and no-cost classes year-round, and the first Texas nonprofit Apple Certified Training Center. Particularly serving families with generational ties to East Austin. Anne Goetzmann Kelley is later named "Best Fairy Godmother to Austin's Kid Filmmakers" by the Austin Chronicle.
An idea called Cinemaker.
Faiza Kracheni returns from a tour with her band, inspired by a friend's Brooklyn co-working space. With Executive Director Anne Goetzmann Kelley and producer Carrie Cates, she begins designing what becomes the Cinemaker Studio Access Program. Simple notion: make it easier for people to make things.
A home at 2200 Tillery.
MMAC expands into a 20,000 sq ft warehouse at 2200 Tillery Street in East Austin, self-funding nearly $200K in build-out. Classrooms, studios, gear, and community under one roof.
Cinemaker Studios launch.
The Cinemaker Studio Access Program officially opens — Texas's first low-cost membership studio model. Flat monthly fee instead of hourly rates. Independent artists can finally afford to experiment.
DaVinci, digital literacy, broader access.
MMAC becomes the first DaVinci Resolve Training Center open to the public in Austin. We also launch digital literacy courses on iMac basics — meeting people exactly where they are, regardless of prior experience with technology.
PLAY AT HOME launches.
The pandemic hits. While other organizations rush to put in-person curriculum onto Zoom, we survey our students first, then build something new. PLAY AT HOME launches in April — free and low-cost two-hour virtual workshops with materials kits delivered to your door. Over 1,000 students within months. The program goes global: students log in from Italy, long-separated friends find each other in the same Zoom. Featured in the Austin Chronicle.
An international moment.
We were set to host an international exhibition with UNESCO Media Arts Creative Cities Network — the pandemic forces that to pivot, but the international partnership endures. The work expands beyond Austin even as the doors temporarily close.
Reopen. Residencies launch.
We reopen with new residency programming. Artists in Motion — a media arts residency for artists who haven't yet exhibited publicly — launches alongside expanded support for working artists making new work.
A new Executive Director.
After a decade of building within the organization — from Cinemaker concept to programs director to deputy director — Faiza Kracheni becomes Executive Director. An East Austin native taking the helm of the organization she helped shape.
A hard goodbye to Tillery.
As Austinites continue moving around the city to battle affordability and rent hikes catch up with us too, we say goodbye to 2200 Tillery. Time to rethink the one-location model — what does a community arts center look like when the community itself keeps being displaced?
Despite the cuts, the work continues.
Federal cuts hit the arts sector hard, but we don't slow down. We launch CINEMAKER CONNECT — a new exhibition program highlighting the work coming out of the studios. We open our spaces for community rentals at low or no cost. And we bring back beloved rotoscope animation courses.
A year of building.
We launch The Roster — a digital database of program participants and a tool for HIRING LOCAL. We experiment with Two Artists × Six Months — a new concept where two local media artists get free Cinemaker access for six months with no deliverables, no strings. We expand the Artist Access Program, rename our certificate program Film Forward, and begin building a retail space for local goods — film stock, supplies, and more.
Still building.
Twenty-four years in. Same mission, expanded footprint, growing community. As Austin keeps changing, we keep rethinking what community support looks like — and inviting the artists who use what we build to help shape what comes next.
Rooted in East Austin.
For more than two decades, East Austin has been our home — and that's not by accident. This neighborhood has long been a culturally vibrant landscape for the historically underserved and unseen talent that the industry has overlooked. The artists, families, and creative communities here have shaped American storytelling in ways the institutions rarely credit. We've been here because the work belongs here.
Our staff, teaching artists, board, and program participants are of these communities — not just serving them from the outside. That lived experience shapes how we build programs, who we hire, and how we show up. The neighbors who walk through our doors don't just reflect the communities we serve — they help shape every decision we make. And we're constantly auditing alongside them: who is this for? Why are we doing it? How can we do it better?
Five pillars, one mission.
Infrastructure is the mission.
We're not a service. We're a system. The studios. The classes. The residencies. The hiring tools. The exhibition platforms. The retail space, soon. We build the plumbing of a creative sector that works for the artists in it — not just the corporations sitting on top of it.
Access is non-negotiable.
Film and media are some of the most expensive art forms in the world. We don't accept that the people who get to tell stories should only be the people who could already afford to. Every program we run starts with the question: who's structurally being kept out, and how do we open the door?
First generation artist to working creative professional.
The hardest moment in any creative career is the first one. We meet artists at the very beginning — first short, first photo series, first time someone hires them — then stay in the work the whole way through. Education. Residencies. Paid contracts. Public showcases. Built end-to-end so nobody has to figure it out alone.
70% of our participants are within Austin city limits. The other 30% travel in from across the country, with international participants too — for short and long-term programs, and for the kind of underground, indie media arts events we curate. People get on a plane for this. That's how needed it is.
Community is the work.
We're artist-run — built by working artists and shaped by the people we serve. Our staff teaches the classes. Our members co-design what comes next. East Austin has been home for twenty-four years, and we plan to stay rooted while the work expands. Nobody is doing this to us, or for us. We're doing it together.
Local is sacred.
Austin's creative community is being displaced in real time — by rent, by ownership changes, by an industry that extracts more than it gives back. We're committed to keeping it rooted: through low and no-cost spaces, through HIRING LOCAL tools, through a retail concept that puts local goods on local shelves, and through an organizational model that doesn't sell out the people it claims to serve.
Two decades of meaningful partnerships across the arts ecosystem — from grantors who back the mission to creative businesses that share the work.
City of Austin Arts, Culture, Music & Entertainment Division ✦ National Endowment for the Arts ✦ Texas Commission on the Arts ✦ Optimist Club of Austin
Kodak Motion Picture ✦ Austin Movie Gear ✦ Holland Photo Imaging ✦ Precision Camera