Marina Otero Verzier is an architect based in Rotterdam. She is Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), the Dutch institute for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture. At HNI she leads initiatives such as “Automated Landscapes”, focusing on the emerging architectures of automated labour, and “BURN-OUT: Exhaustion on a planetary scale”, instigating forms of care for multispecies, collective bodies.
Recently, she curated the exhibitions “Spirits in the Material World” by Heman Chong (2019), “Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective by Jonas Staal” (2018), and co-curated “Malware: Symptoms of Viral Infection” (2019), “I See That I See What You Don’t See” at La Triennale Di Milano (2019).
Previously, she was the curator of “Work, Body, Leisure,” the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), Chief Curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale together with the After Belonging Agency, and the director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X- Columbia University GSAPP (New York).
Otero is a co-editor of Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay In Transit (2016), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), More-than-Human (forthcoming, 2020), and editor of Work, Body, Leisure (2018).
She studied at TU Delft, Columbia GSAPP, and ETSA Madrid, where she completed her PhD. Her thesis “Evanescent Institutions” examined the emergence of a new paradigm for cultural institutions. Since September 2020, Marina holds the position of Head of the Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven.
