2024 Researcher-in-Residence
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the SOM Foundation are pleased to announce Maya Livio as the recipient of the inaugural Researcher-in-Residence in Los Angeles this summer, an award offered jointly by the two organizations.
One of the most important attitudes of the MAK Center program is that experimentation requires deep engagement and reflection, with the explicit purpose of supporting and investing in individuals at the cutting edge of their fields whose work will impact the cultural landscape at large. Residencies at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House offers emergent thinkers, designers, and researchers working across disciplines to engage with Los Angeles as a site of research and dialogue, in order to heighten their work to the next level of exploration.
Maya Livio
Maya Livio probes at the contact zones between ecosystems and technological systems. Her interdisciplinary, justice-oriented work spans research, writing, media-making, and curation, and has been featured in The Washington Post, VICE, Vanity Fair, The Institute of Networked Cultures, and NPR, among others. It has also been supported by venues such as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, A-Z West, Redline Contemporary Art Center, SUPERCOLLIDER, and Labocine by Imagine Science Films. She commissioned and programmed new media arts as Curator of MediaLive, an annual international festival at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) (2015–2020), and commissioned and programmed old media arts as Curator of the Media Archaeology Lab, a collecting institution for historical technologies (2016–2021). In 2023, Livio was awarded the Caltech-Huntington Residency for her project “Salvaging Birds,” a film and set of works on AI-driven conservation through the lens of queer ecology. She was also awarded the 2023 Airlie Research and Innovation Award for undertaking a project at Airlie, the site at which Earth Day was founded. Livio holds a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, MA from the University of Amsterdam, and is Assistant Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media and Communication at American University.
”I am warmly grateful to the SOM Foundation and the MAK Center for championing multidisciplinary inquiry and for supporting this project on the overlapping urgencies of human and more-than-human thriving in Los Angeles. The support of the Researcher-in-Residence award will enable me to conduct interviews and curate a multi-stakeholder public program to bring together some of the city’s engaged communities working on questions of just habitability and cohabitation. This project will amplify important work already taking place, surface shared values, and cultivate pressing cross-community discussions about what livability can look like.”
“Hospes: Housing Justice and Multispecies Cohabitation at the Wildland-Urban Interface” is a curatorial and artistic research project that investigates the frictions and affinities between environmental and housing justice organizations in Los Angeles, aiming to spark dialogue, collaboration, and exchange towards just and multispecies futures.
Los Angeles, one of the most diverse and biodiverse urban centers in the world, faces significant challenges related to rapid urbanization, unhoused peoples, climate change, biodiversity loss, and the need for sustainable development. As such, it is home to a rich set of organizations, artists and designers, engaged communities, and activists who center housing justice, conservation, Indigenous land justice, and habitat connectivity across the city’s fractured landscapes. These projects and communities often lack space for dialogue around shared goals and commitments such as habitability and are sometimes even positioned as in false conflict due to scarcity logics.
Project Focus
Residency Overview
The Researcher-in-Residence is a $5,000 award and four-to-eight-week summer residency at R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles, California. The residency is awarded annually to an architect, artist, and/or researcher based in the United States to conduct original research that contributes to the current topic. The Researcher-in-Residence Program was jointly established in 2024 by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the SOM Foundation to provide space and time for rigorous work that addresses pressing issues related to the built environment.
This year’s topic seeks to explore affordable, equitable, and innovative modes of multifamily housing that respond to current and future needs. These housing strategies need to consider changing demographics, collectivity, economy, work patterns, and the environment, through the exploration of design strategies, community engagement, economic models, and legal policies. With housing costs continuing to escalate and adequate housing remaining inaccessible for many in our communities, we need to think and build in a smart and sustainable way, update existing housing developments, and foster the adaptive reuse of other existing typologies to create thriving communities and healthy neighborhoods.
Eligibility
The Researcher-in-Residence program is open to US-based professionals researching or practicing in a discipline that relates to the built environment.
The SOM Foundation and the MAK Center recognize that research and innovation benefit from a diverse range of perspectives, backgrounds, and approaches. That said, successful applicants will likely demonstrate a history of commitment to one or more of the following disciplines: architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, engineering, architectural history, sociology, writing, and/or visual art.
• Applicants must be based in the US. US citizenship is not required.
• Currently enrolled students are ineligible to apply, however doctoral candidates who have completed all coursework (ABD) may apply.
• Couples are eligible to apply together, however only one amount will be awarded, and the residency room must be shared.
• MAK Center employees, SOM Foundation board members and paid consultants, and SOM employees are ineligible to apply.
• Previously awarded SOM Foundation fellows may apply
Dates &
Location
The term of this residency is four-to-eight weeks between June 1 and July 31, 2024. Exact dates during this timeframe are flexible. The residency is located in Los Angeles at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House. Originally designed by R.M. Schindler as a model home in 1936, the Fitzpatrick-Leland House also serves as the MAK Center’s Study Center. The residency includes a private bedroom, work space, bathroom, and access to communal kitchen and social spaces of the Fitzpatrick-Leland House. The residency spaces are located on the second floor of a residential house, which require one flight of stairs. Due to space constraints, the residency is unable to accommodate additional family members or pets (except service animals).
Award
A $5,000 award will be provided on the following schedule: 50% within 30 days upon signing the residency contract; and 50% within 30 days after the successful completion of the residency. The $5,000 award is intended to cover residency expenses such as flights, rental car, gas, food, materials, etc., as these expenses are not covered by the residency. Please note that the Fitzpatrick-Leland House is located at Mulholland Drive and Laurel Canyon, which is in a residential neighborhood and best accessed via car (a car is not provided by the residency).
Outcomes
During the research period, the MAK Center and the SOM Foundation will schedule periodic check-ins with the recipient. The MAK Center and the SOM Foundation will provide mentorship and networking support to recipients. Each residency will culminate with a public talk or program related to the recipient’s research and interests. The nature of this program is flexible and will be proposed by the recipient and organized with MAK Center staff. The public talk or program can present work in progress or can be final. Work and research conducted during the residency can be continued after the residency period. Research projects are not required to be directly related to Los Angeles in order to be considered.
Apply
The application for 2024 is closed.
FITZPATRICK-LELAND HOUSE
Each resident is given exceptional access to the three-level hillside house designed by R.M. Schindler.
HISTORY OF RESIDENCIES AT THE FITZ
From 2008-10 the Fitzpatrick-Leland House served as a base for the MAK Center’s Urban Future Initiative (UFI), a fellowship program in which cultural thinkers from diverse nations entered into dialogue about urban space with Los Angeles scholars and practitioners. The fellowship provided for two month residencies at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House to promote meaningful exchange between cultural thinkers and Los Angeles practitioners in order to explore the complexity of "the city" in relationship to the built environment, growth and migration, economics, politics, gender, and the natural environment. The fellowship’s mission was to cultivate visionary conceptions of the urban future. In 2022, in partnership with the Danish Art Foundation, the MAK Center hosted Chris Halstrøm and Pettersen-Hein as Designers-in-Residence.
Since then, the MAK Center has dedicated the house to small-scale events and the lodging of international cultural researchers visiting Los Angeles for artistic and scholarly pursuits.
