Maia Chao is an artist working in performance, video, and social practice. She often works with and through feelings of ambivalence, using absurdity as a tool to explore how meaning forms, slips, and falls apart. She gravitates toward repetition, mimicry, doubling, looping, drivel, abstraction, and other phenomena that might be rationalized, but are, in truth, abiding fixations.

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​Chao has created commissioned works for the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, The Shed, and MoMA Education, and she co-created Look at Art. Get Paid., which piloted at the RISD Museum. Her work has been presented at the Bronx Museum, Cuchifritos Gallery, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Boston Center for the Arts, Tufts University Art Galleries, Smack Mellon, and Oregon Contemporary. She has completed fellowships and residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, Pioneer Works, and Queer|Art. Named a Pew Fellow in 2022, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023.

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For various works, she has collaborated with Ethan Philbrick, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Ree Bradley, Zoë Chao, and Josephine Devanbu, among others. Based in Philadelphia, Chao holds a BA in Linguistic Anthropology from Brown University and an MFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently full time faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). 

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maiachaos(at)gmail.com / @maia.pologies