Maya Kosover (she/they) is a community facilitator, artist, and educator based in Chicago. I am committed to the arts as our bridge back to ourselves and each other through accessing authentic expression, connection, truth, repair, joy, play, and healing. 

My personal orientation for understanding what we’re up against is situated in a healing justice framework. Racism, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, homophobia and the others succeed when we are disembodied, disconnected, and disillusioned. The art I create and the spaces I facilitate invite us into healing by practicing the opposite: embodiment, connection, and radical imagination. My dream is for every human to be tapped into and resourced by their innate creativity. I’m fascinated by our collective imagination and constantly gravitate toward what has yet to be created.

I am currently the Artistic Director at the Jewish Museum of Chicago, a museum crafting accessible, multigenerational entry points to diasporic community building, organizing, and cultural art practices. I am a Jewish Studio Project Facilitator, a facilitation framework with roots in art therapy designed to cultivate creativity as a spiritual practice for social transformation. I am also a facilitator at Studio Pathways, an organization committed to educator and school leader development through inquiry, arts-integration, and culturally responsive teaching & learning. After teaching multi-media journalism and media studies at the public high school level for six years, I now facilitate art workshops for youth, teens and adults. Some orgs I’ve worked with include: Olive Tree Arts Network, Urban Gateways, Marwen, Institute for Jewish Spirituality, JCUA, If Not Now, Richmond Art Center, RYSE, and Teen Talk App.

I identify as a jewish, lesbian, community-taught artist with rich learning lineages, teachers, mentors, and communities of practice. I mostly work with paper as a multi-media collage artist and I love to explore embodied, performance, and ritual art. All I want to do is reclaim public space with other bodies through song & story, practice & play. My art explores my identities, ancestors, values, and dreams for generations to come. In some ways, I’m at the beginning of my development as an artist and eagerly witnessing myself unfold. In other ways, I’ve been developing as an artist since I was eight, coloring rainbow patterns and recording stories in my diary. And in other ways, my ancestor lineage is full of creatives who have been knowingly and unknowingly developing me as an artist for centuries. I am currently creating home in Chicago on the ancestral lands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. To my knowledge, my ancestors come from Germany, Mexico, Spain, Poland, Azerbaijan, and Israel/Palestine.