Maya van Leemput

Background

About Maya van Leemput

Maya Van Leemput is the senior researcher of the ‘Open Time | Applied Futures Research’ team at Erasmus Brussels University ASA. Alongside researchers from the Schools of Arts, this team is currently developing the new research centre ‘Open Arts & Futures’. Maya earned a Ph.D. from the University of Westminster (2001) for research on Visions of the Future on Television. Her critical futures work emphasises co-creative, experiential, relational approaches and unruly futures orientations. She leads transdisciplinary projects addressing culture, media, arts, design, science and technology in society, communication, transformative development, mutual assured diversity, polylogue, ecologies, and urban life. Her research serves creative organisations, social organisations, businesses, institutions, policymakers, and informal groups. She councils students, professionals, researchers, policymakers, artists, activists, civic change makers, and poets. Maya collaborates with visual artist Bram Goots on Agence Future (AF) to explore images of the future with interviews and (co-)creative experiments. AF began in with a journey across 27 countries and continues to produce video documents, installations, exhibitions, and co-creative futures projects. Its latest project, For the Love of Futures, featured at Documenta XV (2022), Re:publica (2022), and Radicale 1924’s arts residency.Maya produced and directed the television documentary ToekomstEN-AvenirS (2011) aired on two Belgian channels. She contributed to the participatory television series Villeneuve-la-série (2012) and led the cross-cultural learning lab MAONO (2012-14) exhibiting co-creations by artists and students from Belgium and the Congo in the INbox (2015) at the Museum of Contemporary Arts of Antwerp (M HKA). Invited by M HKA Maya also contributed to the Moscow Biennial (2015) and co-curated the summer show A Temporary Futures Institute (2017) that included an installation by AF and hosted the Design-Develop-Transform conference organised by Open Time.Maya’s inclusive local futures literacy projects are aimed at generative co-learning. She co-developed the global learning lab LEALA (2010-2017) with the World Futures Studies Federation for UNESCO’s Participation Programme. As an active member of UNESCO’s Futures Literacy network, she contributed to the 9th UNESCO Youth Forum, Anticipation Conference (2015), Global Futures Literacy Design Forum (2019), and Futures Literacy Summit (2021) as well as UNITWIN seminars and the activities of the Flemish National Commission.