Maggie Hazen is a New York-based artist, activist, and filmmaker from Los Angeles whose multi-disciplinary practice uses the transgressive qualities of play to address, disarm, and dismantle the complex dynamics embedded in our institutional systems of control.

Her current projects and installations have evolved through personal collaboration with incarcerated individuals which challenge the prison industrial complex and the destructive ecosystems built by the US carceral state. The carefully chosen elements in her work consider individual experiences within the system while responding to the pressing goal of reimagining new terrains of justice.

In 2019, Hazen founded the Columbia Collective at the Columbia Secure Center for Girls in the Hudson Valley with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists dedicated to the visibility of innocence. The collective later expanded its operations to the Brookwood Secure Center for Youth. Currently, Hazen is in the process of establishing a new art collective with incarcerated artists at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility.

Hazen’s work has been exhibited, screened and performed at institutions including The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; Foreland Contemporary Art Campus, Catskill, NY; Pulse Miami Beach as part of Pulse Play, Miami, FL; The Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, CA; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Light Year on the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn, NY; The Granoff Center at Brown University, RI; Performance Works Northwest, Portland, OR; The CICA Museum in South Korea; and The Boston Young Contemporaries exhibition; Boston, MA; among others.

Hazen has held residencies at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; De:Formal online artist residency; The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Shanghai, China, I:O residency at the Helikon Art Center, Izmit, Turkey; Vermont Studio Center in Vermont and The Pasadena Side Street Projects, Pasadena; CA. She participated as a fellow in the Bronx AIM program and The Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

She has studied at Biola University, Brown University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, New York University, The Stevens Institute of Technology, The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, and the Bard College Clemente courses in the humanities program. She is currently a visiting artist-in-residence at Bard College in the Studio Arts program.