Marina Otero Verzier

Dr. Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher. In 2022 she received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. Her winning proposal Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse examines new architecture paradigms for storing data and how reimagining digital infrastructures could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today.

Since 2020 Otero is the Head of the MA Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven. The program focuses on design practices attuned to ecological and social challenges. From 2015 to 2022, she was the Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut, where she led initiatives focused on labor, extraction, and mental health from an architectural and post-anthropocentric perspective, including “Automated Landscapes,” “BURN-OUT, ” and “Lithium: States of Exhaustion.” Previously, she was Director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, Columbia GSAPP.

Otero has curated exhibitions such as ‘Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains,’ at Galería Municipal do Porto in 2023, ‘Work, Body, Leisure,’ the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, and ‘After Belonging,’ the Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2016. She has co-edited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), A Matter of Data (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), and After Belonging (2016), among others. Otero studied at TU Delft and ETSA Madrid and Columbia GSAPP. In 2016, she received her PhD at ETSA Madrid. Her PhD thesis Evanescent Institutions (2016) examines the emergence of a new paradigms for institutions, and in particular the political implications inherent in mobile and transient structures.