Sofia Martinez has a theory about Washington Heights: it is the most unwritten neighborhood in New York City. Not undocumented — there are archives, there are histories, there are decades of Dominican newspapers and community board minutes. But unwritten in the sense of un-romanticized, un-mythologized by the literary and journalistic machine that has spent the last century turning certain Manhattan streets into icons and leaving others invisible. Martinez grew up on those invisible streets. Her career has been an argument for their significance.

Her mother was a seamstress who worked in the Garment District for 15 years before the industry moved on. Her father drove a livery cab and knew every block of every borough the way most people know their own street. Martinez inherited both of their relationships to the city — her mother’s eye for craft and labor, her father’s understanding of the city as a physical system that different people experience in radically different ways. She attended the New School’s journalism program on scholarship, won a student prize for a piece about West African hair braiders in the Bronx, and graduated with a portfolio that read like a city-as-lived, not a city-as-visited.

Martinez spent five years writing for culture publications before joining Made in NYC as Culture Editor. In that time she profiled street artists who were gentrifying their own neighborhoods, designers whose supply chains ran through basement workshops in Sunset Park, musicians who rehearsed in storage units in Long Island City. Her work consistently found the places where creative labor and economic survival were the same thing — which, in New York, is most places.

“Culture isn’t what happens at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s what happens in the hour before the show, in the apartment where someone is still finishing the piece. That’s where I want to be.”

At Made in NYC, Martinez shapes the editorial vision for how the publication covers creative life in the city — from major cultural institutions to the ceramicists working out of shared studios in Industry City, from fashion designers showing at NYFW to the seamstresses whose labor makes the clothes. She is particularly committed to covering the makers, artists, and cultural producers who are often erased from mainstream coverage of New York’s creative economy.

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