Maya Gurantz is an artist and writer whose work interrogates social imaginaries of American culture, and how constructions of gender, race, class, and progress operate in our shared myths, public rituals, and private desires.

Maya’s videos, performances, installations, and social practice projects have been shown and commissioned by (solo): Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Grand Central Art Center, Catharine Clark Gallery, Greenleaf Gallery, Pieter PASD; (group) the Museum of Contemporary Art Utah, Angels Gate Cultural Center, the Oakland Museum of California, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, Navel LA, Art Center College of Design, The Goat Farm Atlanta, The Great Wall of Oakland, High Desert Test Sites, Autonomie Gallery, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others.

She is the recipient of the inaugural Pieter Performance Grant for Dancemakers and an Artist Residency at the McColl Center For Art + Innovation.

Maya is a regular contributor to The LA Review of Books (where her essay, Kompromat, was the most-read article of 2019), and has written for This American Life, The Frame at KPCC, The Awl, Notes on Looking, Avidly, Acid-Free, Baumtest Quarterly, RECAPS Magazine, and an anthology, CRuDE, published by the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges. She co-translated Be My Knife and Someone to Run With by Israeli novelist David Grossman. In 2018 she received a grant from the UC Humanities Research Institute for “Out of the Archive,” an ongoing project making archives more widely accessible to citizen-researchers. She co-hosts the culture and politics podcast, The Sauce.

For show notes and links to our sources, please click here.

Special Guest: Maya Gurantz.

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