3D representation of Los Angeles habitats. Courtesy of Maya Livio.
The SOM Foundation and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture are pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Researcher-in-Residence. Maya Livio is an interdisciplinary curator, writer, scholar, and media artist, as well as Assistant Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media and Communication at American University. Livio will receive a $5,000 stipend and an eight-week summer residency in the live/work space at R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles for work related to her research proposal entitled “Hospes: Housing Justice and Multispecies Cohabitation at the Wildland-Urban Interface.”
Maya Livio probes at the contact zones between ecosystems and technological systems. Her interdisciplinary, justice-oriented work spans research, writing, media-making, and curation, and has been featured in The Washington Post, VICE, Vanity Fair, The Institute of Networked Cultures, and NPR, among others. It has also been supported by venues such as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, A-Z West, Redline Contemporary Art Center, SUPERCOLLIDER, and Labocine by Imagine Science Films. She commissioned and programmed new media arts as Curator of MediaLive, an annual international festival at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) (2015–2020), and commissioned and programmed old media arts as Curator of the Media Archaeology Lab, a collecting institution for historical technologies (2016–2021). In 2023, Livio was awarded the Caltech-Huntington Residency for her project “Salvaging Birds,” a film and set of works on AI-driven conservation through the lens of queer ecology. She was also awarded the 2023 Airlie Research and Innovation Award for undertaking a project at Airlie, the site at which Earth Day was founded. Livio holds a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, MA from the University of Amsterdam, and is Assistant Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media and Communication at American University.
“I am warmly grateful to the SOM Foundation and the MAK Center for championing multidisciplinary inquiry and for supporting this project on the overlapping urgencies of human and more-than-human thriving in Los Angeles,” says Livio. “The support of the Researcher-in-Residence award will enable me to conduct interviews and curate a multi-stakeholder public program to bring together some of the city’s engaged communities working on questions of just habitability and cohabitation. This project will amplify important work already taking place, surface shared values, and cultivate pressing cross-community discussions about what livability can look like.”