Maya Kóvskaya (PhD UC Berkeley, 2009) teaches Critical Anthropocene & Multispecies Studies; Political Ecophilosophy & Ecological Political Theory; Post-humanist Philosophy of Science & Science, Technology, and Society, as well as Political, Social, & Visual Cultural Theory at Chiang Mai University in the Faculty of Social Science. From 2005-2019, she was a full-time curator & independent art scholar as well, working curatorially on over 35 contemporary art exhibitions worldwide. She has 20 years of research experience in China & 10 in India, & spent the early 90s between Berkeley & St. Petersburg, Russia, focused on the Former Soviet Union. She now lives in Thailand.

Winner of the Yishu Award for Critical Art Writing (2010), Maya has authored, co-authored, edited, translated, & contributed to numerous books & articles on the intersection of the political, cultural, & ecological with contemporary art & visual culture. She has also taught at University of California, Berkeley, Beijing Capital Normal University, Beijing Polytechnic University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, & has lectured extensively on contemporary art, the Anthropocene, politics, visual culture, & curation at universities, museums, & public institutions worldwide.

Current research includes political ecophilosophical research on what she calls the "Anthroposupremocene;" "rethinking the human beyond Anthrosupremacism;" "politics beyond the human & the multispecies polity;" a project on human & elephant entanglements in Northern Thailand against the backdrop of climate change and the coronavirus pandemic; biosemiotics/ecosemiotics; Arendtian "Spaces of Appearance" & visual & popular culture in China & India. She draws on Critical Anthropocene Studies; Multispecies, Human-Animal, & Critical Life Studies; Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science; Ordinary Language Philosophy; Performativity & Speech Act Theory; Linguistic Anthropology; & Peircian semiotics to theorize performative & indexical forms of ecosemiosis & biosemiosis, sympoiesis & more-than-human world-making, & expand study of political membership beyond the human-centric.

After working on political and popular culture and working professionally as a curator and independent scholar of arts and culture during the late-1990s and through the aughts, Maya's research interests returned to the politics of knowledge-making, but in the context of ecological concerns. In 2010 when she was the inaugural Critic-in-Residence for the KHOJ Public Art Ecology Program in New Delhi (2010); conceptualized & taught “Writing Ecologies,” for the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art in New Delhi (2011). She was a fellow, commentator & speaker at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) & Max Planck Institute for the History of Science organized Anthropocene Campus I & II in Berlin (2014 and 2016), & the NOLA Anthropocene Campus in New Orleans at Tulane University (2019). She organized the Decolonizing the Anthropocene Workshop at NYU's Department of Media, Culture & Communication (May 2017), & Decolonizing the Anthropocene Field Meeting with the Climate Change Working Group at NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge & NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute (October 2017), & the "Rethinking Agency in a Multispecies Anthropocene" salon (November 2019). She conceptualized, curated & researched the Natchez Field Station as part of the year-long Mississippi: An Anthropocene River research program (2018-2019), organized by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt & Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, investigating the "entitled exploitation" & the emergent etiologies of the "Anthroposupremocene" in Natchez through linkages between anthroposupremacism & white supremacism, ecocide & genocide, chattel slavery & the rise of the plantation model. She is currently writing a state-of-the-field chapter for the first Thai language book on the Anthropocene, and organizes a multispecies working group at Chiang Mai University

Founder/director of ARC Platform (Anthropocene Research & Curatorial Platform) & Amor Mundi Guerrilla Think Tank, Maya organizes workshops, exhibitions, symposia, & multidisciplinary field meetings, bringing together philosophers, artists, scientists, writers, humanities social science scholars, legal scholars to build new knowledges to confront the political-philosophical, ecological & scientific predicaments of the Anthroposupremocene.

https://mayakovskaya.academia.edu

https://soc-dev.soc.cmu.ac.th/faculty/dr-maya-kovskaya