Hello, I'm Maria. 

I'm currently writing up a non-fiction project on desire, anticipation, and inner and outer time, all felt against moments of collapse, weakness and refusal, and marginalised lives! Partial (!) funding from the Royal Literary Fund (!)

I'm the director of the Invented Futures platform looking at the ways the "the future" is formed, experienced, anticipated and re-steered centred around emerging technology, which has collaborated with Bristol Digital Futures Institute, UCL, The Yard Theatre, the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies and the Centre for Gender and Technology, based at Spike Island, where I'm an Associate Artist.
Notes to Future Worlds ​was commissioned by the Grant Museum of Zoology and Liverpool Museums. 
 

I was given a Goethe Institut NYC Curatorial Research Fellowship. This allows me to work on creating a programme focused on the future city, unruly art, working class cultural production, and financialization called Kicking the back door in with Yasi Alipour and Jack Halberstam, as well the Bronx Museum & its Alvin Baltrop archive.

I'm also the researcher/writer/producer of the Disordered Minds, Disobedient Literature public engagement series focusing on society's assumptions about the threshold between madness and sanity, as well as order and disorder, divergence and typicality, currently in collaboration with the MIND Foundation Berlin & Literature Forum at Brecht Haus. 
I'm doing the same with Grief Time, centred on the diverse ways time can shape the meaning and significance of different grief experiences, developed at Southbank Centre.

I'm a writer who has appeared in Modern Queer Poets by Pilot Press, the Verve Poetry Press, and commissioned by C/O Berlin. I was shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Women Poets' Prize & the Bridport Prize for Poetry. I've been attempting scripts, and was commissioned by ACUD Theater Berlin to write and devise a solo performance. It's been developed into a two-hander with Omnibus Theatre Engine Room, and upcoming, The Pleasance London, HERE Arts Center NYC, and ZOO Edinburgh. 

I've been commissioned by Nicole Eisenman & A.L. Steiner for an artist-curated exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary to create radical public learning relating to archives, failures, and working class lives, as part of Ridykeulous. I've recently worked with Raven Row on Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark as an independent researcher. 

I've appeared in discussions at the York Festival of Ideas, Bristol Technology Festival and Imagine! Festival of Ideas and Politics. I was commissioned to devise a public lecture series titled Persistent Difficulty: Language, Possibility & Freedom by Berlin University of Arts, where I've got an adjunct lecturer role. I've been all things d*ke history/public learning at the Bishopsgate Institute London. 

As an editor I've worked on non-fiction projects with University of Wales Press; non-fiction and fiction with Profile Books/Serpent's Tail; and I've worked in translation with Albino Verlag and Leopard förlag.

Here's my email: maria0leonard [at] gmail.com​