Maya Man (b. 1996) is an artist who examines contemporary identity culture on the internet, focusing on femininity, authenticity and the performance of self online.She works primarily with code and generative software, alongside AI-driven video,extending her practice into installations, textiles, quilts and websites built as art objects.
Man studied computer science and media studies at Pomona College before earning an MFA in media art at UCLA.There she connected with Lauren Lee McCarthy through the p5.js community and worked closely with Casey Reas, who served as her thesis chair.In 2018 she created Glance Back, a browser extension that randomly photographs its users at their computers each day, archiving what she calls “the moments shared between you and your computer”.Her 2022 Art Blockscollection FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT reworks the glossy affirmational graphics common on Instagram.,In 2023 she showed Dress Code in Christie's and Gucci's “Future Frequencies” exhibition on generative art and fashion.That year she also released I'm Feeling Lucky on Verse, a collection linking the randomness of horoscope culture to the randomness of generative code.
With Ann Hirsch she created Ugly Bitches (2023), GAN-composited dolls posed against AI-generated influencer backdrops that critique polished collections such as World of Women. The pair followed it with Little Darlings (2024), using Stable Diffusion to generate hypermasculine figurines posed in video game and action movie settings, with text overlays drawn from bodybuilder thirst-post comments.During Art Blocks' 2024 Marfa Weekend, she also ran fortune-telling sessions using an artist-designed version of the children's game MASH.
For the Whitney Museum's online On the Hour series she made A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City (2024-25), a website takeover built from the format of TikTok day-in-my-life videos.In 2025 her Depop-scraping series (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes was shown at Art Basel Miami Beach's Zero 10 section through bitforms gallery.Drawing on her own background as a youth competition dancer,she used AI text-to-video and text-to-music models to restage scenes from the reality show Dance Moms in StarQuest (2025), a 111-scene generative video work with an accompanying performance-lecture.StarQuest anchored her 2026 solo exhibition “StarPower” at bitforms gallery, which also included quilted prints and rhinestone-lettered garments referencing competition dance uniforms.In May 2026 she performed StarQuest live as a performance-lecture at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn to a sold-out audience.
