Maite Borjabad López-Pastor ︎ is an architect, curator and researcher currently based in Chicago (︎NY︎MAD) and whose work revolves around diverse forms of critical spatial practices, operating across the disciplines of architecture, art and performance.

Since 2017 she has been Architecture and Design Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her last show If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust

(on view through January 3, 2022) is the first exhibition by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in a major US museum. The four interconnected works on view in this site-specific exhibition present broken narratives and fragmented compositions that critically foreground the sociopolitical reality of violence in Palestine—all too often underreported in media and unrecorded in historical accounts. Previous projects include the exhibition and book, Design for Different Futures
co-curated along with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center (2019-2021) and the exhibition My Building, Your Design: Seven Portraits by David Hartt

(2018) organized around a new commissioned photographic series of iconic contemporary buildings across the Americas, exploring non-normative narratives of the built environment we inhabit. She also co-curated Past Forward: Architecture and Design at the Art Institute
(2017) the inaugural installation of the architecture and design collection at the museum, and takes care of evolving the contemporary collection with new acquisitions and commissions as the major recent acquisition PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society
on view in the permanent collection galleries.

Previously, Maite worked at The Met and the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery (NY) and as an independent curator she has developed diverse projects in collaboration with the Emily Harvey Foundation (NY), New Museum Incubator (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastián) among others. These include the exhibition and book Scenographies of Power: From the State of Exception to the Spaces of Exception
(2017) at La Casa Encendida (Madrid), the performance piece and installation Wet Protocols
(2018) she created for the Slovenian Museum of Architecture and Design (Ljubljana) or the co-curated installation A Fine Line: Scenarios for Bordering Conditions
for the San Sebastian Architecture Biennial (2017-18).

She is currently faculty at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania and has previously taught at UIC School of Architecture (Chicago) and at Barnard College and Columbia University GSAPP (NY). She has served as a guest critic in several architecture schools, including Harvard GSD, Pratt Institute, Cornell University, University of Michigan, Portland State University, and IIT. She was a lecturer at the Fitch Colloquium at Columbia University (2017) – Ex-Situ: On Moving Monuments presenting “1:1 Artifacts into the White Cube: A Catalogue of (Im)possibilities when Collecting Architecture.”
Her work has been published in diverse media as Pin-Up Magazine, Domus, Dezeen, Metalocus, Yorokobu, e-flux, the Chicago Tribune, La Tempestad, BBC Culture or El Cultural.

Maite graduated as an architect at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and holds a M.S. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture by Columbia University, New York.

This page is currently under construction for an undetermined period, so in the meantime you can:

Have an overview in Domus about Scenographies of Power y leer una entrevista sobre la exposición con Yorokobu.

Read here a bit about the acquisition PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society and see some of the behind the scenes process here.

Read a review in Abitare of My Building, Your Design: Seven Portraits by David Hartt y también puedes leer un ensayo acerca de la exposición para La Tempestad.

Check here some of the shooting process of Wet Protocols and read the exhibition overview in e-flux.

Watch here a teaser of A Fine Line: Scenarios for Bordering Conditions and also check some of the backstage process here.

Find all the ongoing updates of Designs for Different Futures here.