Rotterdam-based
architect Marina Otero Verzier is director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI)—the Dutch institute for architecture, design, and digital culture and the Netherlands' national archive for architecture and urban planning. Alongside the direction of research projects and curation of several exhibitions at Het Nieuwe Instituut (since 2015), Otero has been the curator at the Shanghai Art Biennial 2021. At the 16th Venice International Architecture Biennale in 2018, Otero curated
Work, Body, Leisure for the Dutch national pavilion. As part of the After Belonging Agency, she was Chief Curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. Between 2013-15, while based in New York, Otero was director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, a global network of research laboratories exploring the future of the built environment, launched by the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.
Since September 2020, Otero has been head of the Master in Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. She had previously taught at the Royal College of Art in London, ETSAM, Barnard College, Columbia GSAPP,
HEAD Geneva, and lectured at universities around the world. She has co-edited
More-than- Human (2020),
I See That I See What You Don't See (2020),
Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016-20),
Architecture of Appropriation (2019),
Work, Body, Leisure (2018),
After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (2016), and
Promiscuous Encounters (2014). Otero received her PhD at ETSA Madrid with the thesis Evanescent Institutions, examining the emergence of new paradigms for cultural institutions, and in particular the political implications of temporal and itinerant structures. She has studied architecture at TU Delft and ETSA Madrid, and graduated in 2013 as a Fulbright Scholar from the MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP.
