Maria Persu

Maria Persu is a cultural researcher, writer, and art worker based between London and Bucharest. Maria is a graduate of the BSc programme Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, University College London (2021). In December 2022, she graduated from the programme MSc Culture and Society in the LSE Sociology department, where she was awarded two Hobhouse Memorial Prizes. She is now a PhD candidate in the same department.

Alongside her academic work, at present, Maria is developing her curatorial practice, with a particular interest in off-spaces for contemporary art, whether these may be physical spaces, public events, radio shows, or zine formats. Maria has previously worked as assistant curator at Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest (2022-2025).

Key expertise: postsocialist cultures, new materialisms, epistemology, creative methods

(Working) thesis title: Making Exhibitions, (Un)making Modernities: Re-presenting Nature(-)Cultures in the Afterlives of Progress in Romania

Supervisor(s): Dr Carrie Friese and Dr Jana Melkumova-Reynolds

My PhD thesis engages a diffractive methodology (Barad 2007) – in order to study postsocialist cultures across ecological and social scales. I am particularly interested in how binary representations of nature and culture emerge and are contested through practices of collecting, conserving, and exhibition-making, and in relation to both socialist and capitalist modernities.

Beyond my thesis, I have published pieces on topics such as female monstrosity in cinema, non-normativity in art, (crip) embodiment, and consumer resistance in everyday life. I like to engage with theory-fiction alongside my academic work, being particularly interested in contaminating ways of writing with seeing and making exhibitions.

Art writing

‘From Socialist Realism to Postsocialist Realness: A weird reading-with Șerban Savu’s Painterly Practice’, Common Pinks #2, 2025.

‘AIs, Murderous Showgirls and Other(ed) Monstrous Sights: Re-Presenting the Abnormal in Cinema’, GLEAN Art 4, 2024.

‘The Near and the Elsewhere: A conversation with artist Kristin Wenzel’, Revista ARTA, 2024. Accessible here.

‘Is fantasy a return to childhood?’, Art Viewer, 2023. Accessible here.

'Walking between the disciplinary and the tactical: an embodied view of Certeau’s everyday practice’. In Walking As Research Practice, Soapbox Journal, 2023. Accessible here.

Documentary project

‘Diffracting Bucharest’, 2023-?, with Aurel Minulescu. Originally commissioned by Specula Magazine.

Presentations

Researching postsocialism diffractively for multispecies worlds, Historical Materialism Conference, Cluj/Kolozsvár, 2024

Diffraction as a Research Methodology, Centre of Excellence in the Study of Image (CESI), University of Bucharest, 2024