Maya Man

May 26, 2026

Maya Man (b. 1996) is a New York-based artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. Her websites, generative series, and installations examine dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and self-performance online. She created the browser extension Glance Back and has exhibited internationally at bitforms, NYC; SOOT, Tokyo; Verse, London; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; and Feral File online. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Forbes, Zora Zine, Dirt, Various Artists, and more. Maya holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in Computer Science and Media Studies from Pomona College and an MFA in Media Art from UCLA.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice.

I’m an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. I’ve always been obsessed with the way we make sense of ourselves through what we produce and consume online, and how we’re shaped by what we see there.

One of your recent bodies of work is called Star Quest. Can you tell us a little bit about that project and where it began for you?

Star Quest is a body of work focused on competition dance culture in America. It’s very personal to me because I grew up as a competition dancer, and it’s also heavily based on Dance Moms, the reality television show set in Pennsylvania. I grew up in Pennsylvania, so there are a lot of parallels.

Over the past few years, I have become interested in the analogy between how dancers are trained to achieve perfection, perform on stage, and are judged, and how we perform online on social media platforms, where we’re constantly quantified. I also started thinking about generative AI and how AI models are trained to achieve a sense of perfection and realism in their outputs.

All of that comes together in the world of Star Quest, which consists of 111 scenes. Each scene contains an AI-generated video and AI-generated music and restages a scene from Dance Moms. That’s the core piece. I’ve also performed a lecture-performance on the project in New York and Los Angeles and created a range of auxiliary works that expand the universe of this imagined dance studio and television show.

You’ve spoken before about embracing the loss of control that comes with working with generative AI. How does that idea carry over into the physical elements of the project, where your hand is much more present?

This is my first major work involving AI-generated video, but in all of my previous work, there’s usually some element of randomness, especially when I’m working with software. Giving up some agency has always felt comfortable to me. Being an artist means making countless decisions on your own, and having some of those choices made by a machine can actually feel relieving.

When I’m making physical work, though, there isn’t as much room for randomness. The physical works that accompany these projects are meant to complement and augment the digital world I’m creating on screen. Digital work already contains a certain fluidity and immateriality, so in a gallery setting, I want viewers to be reminded of the physical truth and texture of this world: the tulle, sequins, and materials up close.

For my upcoming exhibition at Bitforms, I’m also creating motivational prints inspired by those found in Abby Lee Miller’s dance studio, but reimagined through my fictional Shimmer Dance Studio, with quotes AI-generated from her studio and my own former dance studio’s Instagram. Bringing all of these elements into the space creates an environment around the digital work. It’s almost like adding metadata to a file, providing context and information that surrounds the work and shapes how it’s experienced.

Earlier you mentioned the lecture-performance for Star Quest, which I had the privilege of seeing in New York. Where did that begin for you? Why was that format important?

It started with thinking about this body of work as something that was deeply personal and so rooted in performance and my experience growing up as a dancer. I spent many years performing on competition dance stages and I’ve given lectures before. This felt like an opportunity to really bring those two experiences together. I’m very conceptually driven, and the lecture-performance became a way to walk people through everything I was putting into the work and the process of making it, things that aren’t necessarily straightforward when you’re just looking at the piece.

The work itself runs in a randomized order, constantly shuffling clips rather than playing as a traditional video. Because of that, there are aspects of the project and the thinking behind it that aren’t always immediately visible to viewers. The lecture-performance became a way to provide that context and guide people through the ideas that informed the work.

I actually started by writing the lecture first, and all of the staging, choreography, and performance elements came afterward. My background is in computer science and media studies, so I come from a more theoretical perspective on media, and starting from writing felt very natural to me. The lecture-performance allowed me to combine that framework with my experience as a performer and dancer, bringing those different parts of my practice together in a single form.

Your own internet presence is interesting — your work exists online, you’re online, and those things often blur together. Do you find yourself negotiating how Maya the artist appears online versus the work itself?

I think about it all the time. A really freeing moment for me was embracing the idea that everything online is performance, and since so much of my work is already about performance, that realization felt very natural. As an artist, I like being in control, and what’s interesting about social media is that you’re simultaneously in control and not in control. In other channels you’re often mediated by galleries, writers, or institutions, but when you’re uploading images to Instagram, you’re making those decisions yourself and shaping how you communicate your work.

That’s very compelling to me. Everyone is spending so much time on social media and thinking about attention, where people are looking and what they’re engaging with. Being able to insert your practice into that environment is exciting.

There are certainly things I feel critical of when it comes to social media platforms, but I still hold on to some of the idealism that existed around the early internet: the idea of sharing, self-publishing, and creating your own channels of communication. For artists especially, I think that’s still meaningful, and it’s become an important part of my practice, particularly because so much of my work is about that ecosystem itself.

Can you tell us about Heart and how it fits into your practice?

Heart was a curatorial project I used to run out of my studio. The program’s focus was on artists who were interested in one or more of three things: pop culture, software, and the internet. It grew out of a desire to highlight artists whose work I loved and learned from, particularly in New York, where many galleries are less open to experimental work that engages with software or digital media. Heart became a way to gather people around one-night events, whether exhibitions, artist talks, or performances.

It was incredibly rewarding because it complemented my own practice. Making your own work can be very solitary and self-focused, and Heart gave me a way to make a broader statement about artists whose practices felt connected to one another, even if those connections hadn’t been formally recognized. It’s been a really fruitful project and one I’ve learned a lot from.

Maya Man

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