Maya Ober
Title
Honorary Doctor
Person Type
Honorary
Maya Ober is a trained industrial designer and holds an MA in Design Research from the Bern Academy of the Arts. Her activism and involvement in feminist movements led her to pivot into the field of anthropology. Currently, her PhD research on the seam of engaged anthropology and feminist theory explores the possibilities of feminist practices within institutional life and design education. Her work has been published internationally in books and journals, including the Journal of Design History.
Maya has taught around the world, holding research and teaching positions at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel and the Institute of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Bern. As an educator invested in reimagining design education, she spearheaded the Intersectional Lab in Arts and Design program, where she worked to open up spaces for new pedagogies, bringing feminist politics into the very fabric of how design is taught.
As an editor, Maya founded the platform depatriarchise design, a platform that fosters critical dialogue about structural inequalities in design and amplifies feminist perspectives. This initiative later merged with Futuress, an intersectional feminist platform for design politics. Maya is a co-director of Futuress along with Mio Kojima, where her work extends across editing, publishing, community-building, curatorial projects, and the collective labor of imagining design otherwise.