Hi there! My name is Maya Kosover (she/they) and I am a white jewish queer artist and educator. I am committed to the arts as our bridge back to ourselves and each other through accessing expression, connection, truth, joy, mystery, play, and healing. 

My art is sometimes silly, sometimes spiritual, almost always sacred. In some ways, I’m at the very beginning of my development as an artist and I’m 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.

After teaching multi-media journalism and media studies at the high school level for six years, I now facilitate healing arts workshops for youth at community art centers and schools. I see storytelling as the through-line of it all. My devotion to youth & educator development is sacred work and the ultimate labor of love. You can learn more about my learning lineage & communities here.

I am currently a Jewish Studio Project Fellow, a facilitator training program designed to cultivate creativity as a spiritual practice for social transformation. I am also a mentee and facilitator at Studio Pathways, an organization committed to educator and school leader development through inquiry, arts-integration, and culturally responsive teaching & learning. My teachers, mentors, friends, and collaborators at both of these orgs have deeply transformed my being and I’m forever grateful for our relationships that continue to evolve & nurture.

Most of my art right now is collage. I really love me a zine. I love vibrant colors and flowers for the ways they orient me toward beauty. My latest project does exactly that by tempting us to replace current systems / ways of being that do not honor our dignity & humanity with something from our natural world that is life-affirming, joyous, vibrant & beautiful. A lot of my art comes from abolitionist or feminist or queer texts that transform me. More recently, a lot of my art is Jewish. I’m falling back into my lineages, searching for and reclaiming Jewish time, images, language, symbols, practices, rituals, prayers, & songs. Ancient Jewish dreamwork has me excited AF right now, especially when I weave it in with modern conversations around dreaming for rest, reparations, and resisting capitalism. You can see some of that excitement here. 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 orient toward what has yet to be created.

While most of my art until this point has been visual, I’m magnetically being pulled toward performance, embodied, and ritual art. I’m looking to deepen my practice in Theater of the Oppressed (TO) because it is through this practice I have experienced myself and others in our truest humanity. TO sits at the intersection of political education, performance art, and social activism, and is referred to as the “rehearsal for the revolution.” AKA it is an absolute magical dream so if you’re down, let’s connect. All I want to do is reclaim public space with other bodies through song & story, practice & play.