BIOGRAPHY

Maxi Cohen is an award-winning artist and filmmaker based in New York City. For over five decades, her work has explored the intersections of human consciousness, social engagement, and immersive artistic experience across film, video, photography, and multimedia installations. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

After graduating from New York University, Cohen directed and produced Are You There?, a weekly community television series in Cape May, New Jersey, recognized by the National Cable Television Association as the first example of interactive community television. The project helped reverse the town’s decline and established it as one of four nationally landmarked towns, exemplifying her early commitment to media for social change.

In New York City, Cohen became director of the nation’s first public access television facility, the Video Access Center at NYU’s Alternate Media Center. That year she executive produced over 5,000 hours of television, hosted Salvador Dalí for his first three-camera shoot, filmed Allen Ginsberg in his East Village tenement, Yoko Ono in her White Room at the Dakota, among many landmarked events. She later co-founded the Independent Feature Project, representing independent filmmakers nationally, and First Run Features, the first company dedicated to distributing American independent feature films.

At 23, Cohen directed and produced Joe and Maxi, a feature-length documentary exploring her relationship with her father. Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival and theatrically released in 1980, it is now preserved in MoMA’s archives with a 4K copy recently completed. Known for its groundbreaking intimacy, the film influenced two generations of documentary filmmakers and received a preservation grant from the NYWIFT Preservation Fund. She directed Anger for Seven Women Seven Sins, an omnibus film that won top festival prizes in Tokyo and Montreal.

Cohen’s work continued to respond to urgent social issues. For South Central Los Angeles: Inside Voices, she gave video cameras to African Americans, Latinos, and Koreans living and working in the areas of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. This first hand perspective of racism premiered on Showtime and Europe’s ARTE and ZDF, with ZDF naming it “Best Documentary in Series” for 1994. It was the first time a film made by real people was seen on television. 

In response to governments internationally misunderstanding ayahuasca, Cohen made The Holy Give Me about the Santo Daime, a legal syncretic Brazilian ayahuasca church. 

Cohen executive produced From Shock to Awe about veterans who were suicidal and recovered themselves with ayahuasca and MDMA. Theatrically released in 2018, it is now digitally available. Considering a commitment to heal our veterans is patriotic, the film was shown at a briefing in Congress. It has been shown to policy makers in several countries and has changed and saved many lives.  

Cohen’s latest film is Ayahuasca Diaries, a collaboration with spiritual leaders from Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador and contemporary scientists spanning ayahuasca’s mind-boggling transformative power to its role in the frontline defense of the Amazon. Made with the intention of healing people and the planet, it preserves and proliferates Indigenous wisdom.

Cohen has made films for Saturday Night Live, Comedy Channel, MTV, PBS, the Children’s Television Workshop, Fox, ARTE, and developed series for the BBC, CPB, HBO, and Turner.

Cohen’s long-term series of photography, multimedia, and installation works—Specimens from the Amazon, The Art of the Pendulum, Ladies Rooms Around the World, TV Nightscapes, and others—culminated in The Poetry of Water (2023–24) at Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, the largest gallery in the Middle East, which showcased video, photography, painting, spatial art, and video furniture. Building on twenty-five years of making art about water worldwide, she is now developing A Movement in Water™, a public art installation integrating art, technology, architecture, science, and education. Its conceptual phase was completed in the first cohort of the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Design Science Studio.

Cohen has been recognized with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Karan Weiss Foundation, and Jerome Foundation, among others. Across her career, she has continually explored the power of immersive, socially engaged, and transpersonal art and film to shift consciousness, connect communities, and inspire reverence for the natural world.