Maya is a community-taught interdisciplinary artist and organizer based in New Orleans.

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Maya’s work, both as artist and organizer, investigates how mythology—both ancient and contemporary—can be harnessed to dismantle colonial impositions on our relationships to body, home, and time. Drawing on conventions of allegory and magical realism, Maya explores the power of dis- and re-embodiment, placing the bodies of storytellers within her fantastical realms, or positioning fantastical creatures within realistic, contemporary settings. Through these spaces, she untangles the accepted origins of our homes and bodies, elevating the truth of our collective imaginations and degrading the American mythocracy. Her practice spans a range of mediums—including film, mask and creature-making, writing, immersive performance, community story circles, and installation—all of which aim to cultivate spaces where the past intersects with the future in a new mythical realm, one where collective healing is possible. Some of the frameworks that guide Maya's work include narrative therapy, the “becoming mythical” of history, spiralic time, partcipatory action research, comparative mythology, and dreams.​​

Maya's recent creature photography and mixed media art has been displayed at galleries such as the Southern Exposure gallery (San Francisco), Bark gallery (Berlin), and Staple Goods gallery (New Orleans). Her writing appears in publications such as Tilted House Review and Metal Hurlant. 

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She has had the pleasure of participating and learning from local programs such as New Orleans Film Festival’s Emerging Voices fellowship, and is a recent winner of South Pitch, where she received the Warner Brothers' Innovation Hub award for her feature length screenplay, “Flammable Water.”

As co-director of the film production collective Studio Lalala, Maya seeks to provide free studio space, equipment access, and film education for photographers and filmmakers of color. Through her work with Cooperation New Orleans, she helps organize the support of Black and Indigenous worker-owned cooperatives. Her work with Cooperation Gumbo seeks to archive and uplift the Black cooperative histories of New Orleans to pave a cooperative way forward. Maya also serves on the editorial staff for the literature collective Tilted House, and is a member of Latinx art collective, Collectiva Manos.  

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In tandem with Maya's work as a storyteller and visual artist, she is an active organizer within the solidarity economy movement, which reimagines a future where people have what they need and are free from the prison of extractive economies. She is deeply grounded in collective processes, and wants to challenge the way artists are forced to isolate themselves from their current context in order to thrive. ​