Maya Bamberger
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Maya Bamberger is an independent curator and scholar based in New Haven. From 2019 to 2023, she served as the curator at RawArt Gallery in Tel Aviv, where she curated numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Noam Toran’s “We Crave Blood” (2023), Ester Schneider’s “Temperance” (2023), Keren Gueller’s “Wet Collection” (2022), Dov Heller’s “Nirim” (2021), and Sagie Azoulay’s “Ernie” (2020). She also spearheaded the “Shuttle Project” (2020-2022), which supported emerging artists at the beginning of their careers. Maya has curated significant independent projects, including “Understandable Misunderstanding: How to be with art?” (2024), an online group exhibition, and Hilla Toony Navok’s “Choreographing the Public: Rolling Rooms” (2020) at OnCurating Project Space in Zurich.
Maya holds a Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) in Curating from Zurich University of the Arts (2021) and a BA in Art History and Cognitive Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017). She is a 2024 cohort member of the School of Commons and recently initiated and edited the inaugural issue of Shoket magazine for curating (2023). She has also participated in several residencies and fellowships, including a virtual residency with Triangle Brooklyn in collaboration with Artis in 2021 and a fellowship with the Alma program from 2021 to 2023.
Curatorial Statement:
Maya Bamberger is an independent curator and learner based in New Haven. Drawing on her oversensitivity to power abuse and falsehood, she curates to transform antagonism into worldbuilding—always with the joy of others. Concerns driving her work include staying with the unknown, caring infrastructures for artists, decolonialism and her Jewish lineage. She approaches exhibition-making not as instrumentalized representations which simply echoe the world as it is, but with a question, inviting artists to form an ephemeral research community. Through an ecology of joint spectatorship in the studio, deep listening, welcoming failures, reading theory and poetry and the introduction of movement, we invite reciprocal influence to surface organically.
The geopolitics of the Middle East, and urgently, the genocide of Palestine, which fuels global polarization, catalyze an ongoing process of shifting guilt into response-ability. The core question driving her work is how the curatorial space can become a site for co-inhabiting and co-fabulating the "not-yet"—a third space where relationships are not bound by essentialist structures of domination but can be formed otherwise, without erasing or reproducing them.
She holds a BA in Cognitive Science and Art History and an MAS in Curating, yet her primary teachers are the artists she works with. To escape the regime of cognition, she practices scores by artists, learning with the body. Her writing aspires to support art’s potent force in transforming relational dynamics between objects and subjects, addressing not an already oppressed and alienated audience, but future community.
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