Hello, I'm Maria.
Currently writing up a creative non-fiction project on desire, anticipation, inner and outer time, and marginalised lives. Partial funding from the Royal Literary Fund.
& I’m working towards what is likely a body of poems on household maintenance, revelation on this ordinary earth - the soul in paraphrase […] heaven in ordinary -intergenerational silence/institutional death, construction/farming and what other people have called the working class butch experience.... :)
&& a novel that’s a sensual and absurd look at (vigilante) justice, innocence, grace, intimacy/cruelty, trans* futures, and what possessing will actually is, in the dustbowl of an autonomously governed town where the sun often sinks behind a burning offshore trash pile. Marilynne Robinson meets Bound (1996).
&&& a performance looking at the relationship between two cleaners working for a leading socialist thinker set during the early days of something resembling perestroika, and their mutual desire to re-enact a past violent act. Taking in class, complicity, ecstasy, domination, “dreams”, and Dance Dance Revolution. Developed with ACUD Theater Berlin, Omnibus Theatre Engine Room, and upcoming, The Pleasance, New York Live Arts and LaMaMa. Wipe-clean surfaces only.
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.
Notes to Future Worlds ​was commissioned by the Grant Museum of Zoology and Liverpool Museums.
I was given the Goethe Institut NYC Curatorial Research Fellowship 2023-2024. 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.
I'm also the researcher/writer/producer of the Disordered Minds, Disobedient Literature public engagement series focusing on liminal mental states and society's assumptions about the threshold between madness and sanity, as well as the conscious and the unconscious, order and disorder, currently in collaboration with the MIND Foundation Berlin.
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 with Denise Riley & Rachel Long.
I'm a writer who has appeared in Modern Queer Poets by Pilot Press, the Verve Poetry Press edited by Andrew McMillan, 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 with Omnibus Theatre Engine Room, and upcoming, Hackney Showroom.
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 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. I've been all things dyke* 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.​