Maia Kenney and Berber Meindertsma

Maia Kenney was born in the US under the annual hopeful rise of Orion as he begins his hunt for Scorpius. When pressed for a bio, she remembers that the first exhibition she curated was a house party in her grungy rental in Bloomington, IN where her friends hung their weird crappy art on the walls and a noizzzze band trashed the living room. This was during years working as a baker, the indulgence of art history and writing and curating still a future haze. She’s chasing that high still.
In 2020, she was the assistant curator of Tears of Eros, the first Dutch exhibition to center surrealist women and gender non-conforming artists. She has curated an exhibition on rave culture in the shooting range at Het HEM, worked with KABK students at Nest in LAAK, and contributed to a monographic exhibition on the Dutch surrealist and revolutionary Melle at Museum van Bommel van Dam. From 2023–2024 she was curator and editor of Het HEM’s experimental artistic digital platform The Couch (look it up!). She has taught queer feminist theory at Design Academy Eindhoven since 2021, and contributes regularly to Metropolis M and other arts publications.

Berber Meindertsma was born in Friesland, studied and lived in London (2014–2018) and now lives and works in Amsterdam. She works with artists, artworks, words and art world colleagues to create exhibitions, texts and collaborative creative projects. Her time at the Serpentine Galleries in London (2016–2018) gave her valuable insights into the workings of the contemporary art world, and a thirst to dive into the thick of things. The opportunity to help found Het HEM as a new art space in a former bullet factory in Zaandam, just outside of Amsterdam, made her move countries. At Het HEM she took up various responsibilities, most proudly co-starting The Couch, whilst also continuing to develop her own research interests, such as hosting-as-hospitality.
Since 2024, she is fully focused on being an independent curator and writer—making her side gigs in writing and curating the core of her enterprise. Talk to her about Sonsbeek 2026, where she is the assistant curator; dystopic sci-fi books such as I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin—and of course, camping.