Artist Statement

I like kids' work more than work by real artists any day.

- Jean-Michel Basquiat

Maya is a socially engaged artist and producer working across co-creation, care, and conversation. With a background in visual arts, her interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, drawing, storytelling, movement, video, and community-led live work. She is especially drawn to making that values process over outcome, and to tools that support reflection, dialogue, and shared authorship.

As a neurodivergent artist, Maya experiences socially engaged practice as a special interest - a deep and joyful focus that fuels long-term research and care-driven collaboration. Her work often begins with questions about how people relate, learn, and build meaning together. She is most experienced in working with children and young people and frequently collaborates with intergenerational groups in contexts shaped by social inequality, migration, displacement, marginalisation, and systemic injustice—always prioritising a trauma-informed, relational approach rooted in care, consent, and context.

Over the last decade, Maya has developed and produced projects across community settings and within institutions including Artsadmin, Southbank Centre, Camden Art Centre, Tramway, and De La Warr Pavilion. These have included school-wide takeovers, co-curated exhibitions, intergenerational social dances, and embedded artist residencies. Her approach prioritises anti-racist and anti-institutional frameworks, safer space-making, and art as a method of care.

She is one half of the artist duo Holding Space with artist and peer Natasha Brune-Goodey — a collaborative practice exploring pedagogic space, facilitation ethics, and the design of inclusive, participatory environments.

She is currently studying part-time on the MA in Arts & Learning at Goldsmiths. Her research focuses on the intersections of neurodivergence, blackness, and chronic illness within socially engaged practice, exploring alternative pedagogies, co-designed tools, and institutional accountability. Recent projects include Holding Space / Take Up Space, a collaboration exploring pedagogic space and facilitation ethics, and Bracket, a card-based conversation tool about the decade of ages 15–25, developed with and for young people.

Across all aspects of her work, Maya is committed to building relational, reflective spaces where power is shared and creativity becomes a way of thinking, resisting, and imagining otherwise.