Maya Love (she/her, Pakeha) is a writer, art historian, and communications specialist from Aotearoa, New Zealand, based in Naarm, Melbourne.

Maya is good with planning, project management, people, and prose. She’s a creative and critical multi-tool who has worked across communications, events, and stakeholder management throughout the creative, tertiary education, GLAM and not-for-profit sectors. She recently submitted her PhD which explores the corpse in contemporary art, with the Art History department at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland.

As a freelance writer, Maya has written for Broadsheet, Artzone, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Foenander Gallery, The Art Paper, Webb’s, Sanderson Contemporary, the Govett-Brewster Gallery, and more. A selection of her writing is available here.

She’s the creature lurking behind d_composition.

portfolio

  • Doctor of Philosophy / Art History
    Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland
    Submitted Sep 2025

    Maya’s research explores the affective power of the corpse in contemporary art (1990–present). Led by a fusion of cognitive and affective frameworks, she seeks a phenomenology of the post-humous body in case studies including works by Sally Mann, Matsui Fuyoko, and Iann An.

    Sally Mann captures transience with an unstable photographic process; Fuyuko Matsui’s paintings can decompose under the breath of the viewer; and Iann An’s sculptures literally decompose and intermingle with the audience’s bodies. Each provokes a unique entanglement of cognitive, philosophical, emotional, and affective responses, which are often conflicting, subjective, and prone to change over time.

    Throughout this thesis Maya offer’s up a range of ideas and vocabulary to engage with the ineffability of personal mortality prompted by the corpse in these artworks. The corpse in contemporary art is an entity that oozes between interpretive modes and eschews singular interpretation, resists the language and frameworks we use to define it, and articulates a post-mortem experience that draws us toward liminality, formlessness, and chaos.

    Bachelor of Arts (Honours) / Art History
    First Class Honours
    Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland
    2019

    First in course: MUS704, ARTHIS790

    Maya’s BA (Hons) dissertation won the Adrienne Jarvis Prize in Art History (2019). This research, titled Corporeal Encounters, offered a phenomenological investigation of the corpse across select works by American photographer, Sally Mann, and Mexican interdisciplinary artist, Teresa Margolles. Corporeal Encounters has since been accessioned into the EH McCormick Library collection held at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

    Bachelor of Arts / Art History
    Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland
    2015 – 2018

    First in course: ARTHIS334

  • Maya is good with planning, project management, people, and prose. She’s a creative and critical multi-tool who has worked across communications, events, and stakeholder management throughout the creative, tertiary education, GLAM and not-for-profit sectors.

    Previous experience includes:

    Communications Executive
    Copyright Licensing New Zealand
    2023–2025

    Graduate Teaching Assistant
    University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau
    Art History 230/332: Art Crime (S1 2023)
    Art History 115/G (S2 2023)

    Membership – Special Projects
    Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
    2022

    Membership Coordinator
    Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
    2019–2022

    Marketing Assistant
    University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau
    2019

    Social Media Manager
    Premium Real Estate (On the Points)
    2016–2018

    Junior Publicist (Internship)
    South Pacific Pictures
    2013–2014

    Exhibition Coordinator
    Takapuna Grammar School Works on Paper, Depot
    20–25 Sep 2014
    Click here for more.

  • Panellist
    AAANZ23, Gold Coast, Australia
    It’s alive: the corpse as a “teeming presence” in contemporary art
    December 2023

    Guest lecturer
    University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau
    Art History 114/G
    ”Pop Art” and “Conceptual Art”
    2023

    Presenter
    University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau
    Art History Department Pecha Kucha
    Decomposition: the corpse in contemporary art
    October 2022

    Presenter
    Grave Matters: Imaging the dead, Online
    The corpse in contemporary art
    April 2022

  • New Zealand Art History Teachers Association
    Pop, whaam, honk! The effervescence of Pop Art
    November 2023

    Webb’s Select
    Art in Aotearoa: A brief history
    June 2023