maria thrÆn

Maria Thrän (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and writer based between Berlin and Seattle.

Their research-driven practice weaves mechatronics, radio transmission, spatial sound, video, and light into kinetic installations and live works that explore rhythm, embodied memory, and more-than-human communication. Trained in visual arts and sound, Thrän investigates how performance can enact forms of care, refusal, and listening that resist spectacle and center ethical presence.

Their doctoral research examines how voice, ritual, and sensing technologies can operate as systems of care rather than tools of extraction. The voice functions as both transmitter and sensor—an embodied technology carrying breath, grain, tension, and refusal beyond language.

Drawing on feminist and decolonial thinkers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Saidiya Hartman, and Dwight Conquergood, Thrän approaches sound not as an aesthetic object, but as a sensory ethics of relation.