I am currently an independent curator, architect and researcher. My work revolves around diverse forms of critical spatial practices that span visual art, performance and architecture. Having worked for the past ten years as a curator at major cultural institutions such as the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, I describe my curatorial practice as an “institutional infiltration” that takes place at the intersection of these disciplines, as well as museum studies and institutional decolonial critique. My most recent projects include the exhibition The Production of Otherness (FAD, D-Hub Barcelona, October 2024 - January 2025), the year-long exhibition and public programming Clima Fitness: Rituals of Adaptability and Mutations and Planetary Mutualisms (Matadero Madrid, July 2023–July 2024) and the exhibition A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure: A Rehearsal on Legacy with Zaha Hadid (Contemporary Arts Center – Cincinnati, USA, September 2023–January 2024).


Previously I served as the Neville Bryan Associate Curator of A&D at the Art Institute of Chicago where I took care of the contemporary collection and led fundamental research initiatives and acquisitions to redefine the collecting strategies since I joined in 2017. I also had the opportunity to be co-chair of the Time-Based Media Conservation Initiative at the museum specifically focusing on video art, performance, sound and web-based artworks and informing collecting practices. In my five years tenure at the AIC I also curated numerous collection shows Past Forward (2017-2023) as well as significant installations and temporal exhibitions including: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust (2021-22); PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society by Andres Jaque (2019); My Building, Your Design: Seven Portraits by David Hartt (2019); Designs for Different Futures (2019-2021, co-curated with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center). Later, as Curator at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum I curated Sections/Intersection: 25 Years of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection (2022-23) a major collection reinstallation (along with the accompany catalogue as co-editor and writer) and the new-commissioned performance Dance of the Mutating Materialities (2022) by Cecilia Bengolea.


I have also been a professor at several universities, including ETSAM - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (2023-currently), University of Pennsylvania (2019-21), University of Illinois at Chicago (2018) and GSAPP - Columbia University (2017) and have shared my research and practice in important forums like being the Visiting Artist Lecture at Northwestern University, Chicago (2022) or the Fitch Colloquium at Columbia University (2017) where I presented the lecture Collecting Architecture and Moving Buildings. My writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues like the essay When Anatomy Becomes a Map included in the catalog Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines (Ed. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2025) or important research articles like “‘Rerighting’ History: The Benito Juarez Community Academy” in Harvard Design Magazine 48, America (2021), “Infraestructura para porosidades selectivas. El Limboscape de Ceuta” in ARQ, no. 99, Infraestructura (Chile, 2018) [ESP] [ENG] or texts like  “Truth is Not a Noun: Eyal Weizman and Maite Borjabad in conversation.”


My work has appeared in major media such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The National News, PIN-UP, Frieze (‘I Think Friction Is Important’: Maite Borjabad on Challenging Art Institutions’ Status Quo), Domus, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Terremoto Magazine, Domus, La Tempestad, El País (La gran obsesión de Siqueiros: de la prisión de Lecumberri al Instituto de Arte de Chicago) or El Cultural.

I have received some important awards, including the William Kinne Traveling Prize from GSAPP, Columbia University, for my thesis Scenographies of Power: The Designed Materialization of the State of Exception of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden in the Diplomatic Bag (2016); La Caixa Fellowship Award (2014); and La Casa Encendida Emerging Curators Award, with my exhibition Scenographies of Power: From the State of Exception to Spaces of Exception (2017).