Gabriel .A. Maher
I am an interdisciplinary designer based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. My practice engages a critical spatial perspective that brings into view how design and mediated systems shape our social-spatial worlds. Earlier work examined gendered and classed framings in design media. My current research, Cities on Loop: The Algorithmic Rewriting of Public Space in Amsterdam, is developed as part of my PhD at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam, and analyses digitally mediated spatialities through visual, spatial, and technographic methods. This research sits alongside and directly informs the work of my design and research studio in Amsterdam, where I develop work that bring critical spatial analysis into material and visual form.
Informed by a queer and working-class perspective, my practice, research, and pedagogy are closely intertwined, each foregrounding self-reflexivity and agency in creative processes. These commitments shape my teaching across the Contextual Design, Geo-Design, and Social Design Master’s departments at Design Academy Eindhoven, where I also contribute to institutional development through the Masters Course Committee (MCC) and related participation councils.
My creative and research outputs have been presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale (Dutch Pavilion), Serpentine Galleries, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Design Museum London; MAD Museum (New York), the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.), Vitra Design Museum, Milan Salone del Mobile, and Het Nieuwe Instituut. My work has been recognised with international grants and awards, including the IphiGenia Gender Design Award (2019), the Hublot Design Prize shortlist (2018), and residencies such as Iaspis (Stockholm, 2017–18), as well as Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industries Talent Development and Internationalisation Grants, and Keep an Eye Grants (2014, 2016).
Over two decades of pedagogic practice, I have developed innovative teaching methods grounded in embodied and participatory approaches as well as collaborative and collective ways of working that support voice-finding and agency within creative processes. I have taught, lectured, and facilitated workshops across art and design education in the Netherlands and Australia, including at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the Sandberg Institute, the School for New Dance Development (SNDO), the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and RMIT University, among others.
Studio 2.06
de Wittenplaats De Wittenstraat 27
1052 AK Amsterdam
