NYC-Based Multimedia Artist
Maxine Barbosa is a Brooklyn-born multimedia storyteller working across writing, film, and photography. As a Puerto Rican and Guatemalan creative, her work is rooted in identity, memory, and the textures of everyday life.
Moving fluidly between mediums, Maxine explores narrative as both image and language, blurring the line between what is seen and what is felt.
She believes storytelling is a way of preserving fragments of self, turning lived experience into something both intimate and universal.
Recent
"Te Llevo Conmigo" (TLC) is a printed, photo-forward zine (released in May), digging into identity, family, language, cultural memory, and emotional understanding. It's grown into a project that spotlights the voices and creativity of the people in my own circle of friends and family, especially folks who don't usually get access to formal art spaces or the "artist" label. Alongside my own writing and photography, it pulls in contributions inspired by architecture, comics, cooking, and more, making it a interdisciplinary mix.
The zine adapts pieces from a bigger book project plus new reflective writing, leaning text-heavy on purpose, a nod to real literacy in a scroll-fast world, while still staying accessible to readers and non-readers, English and Spanish speakers alike.
Writing
I offers narrative-driven writing that blends the uncanny with the deeply real, crafting anthology-style pieces shaped by travel, human connection, and lived experience. Her work weaves fictional twists into life’s chaos, layered with allegory and subtle easter eggs—perfect for readers drawn to stories that feel both surreal and intimately true.
Photo & film
Images, like stories, hold what's felt before it's understood. I approach film and photography as a way of seeing things exactly as they are: unfiltered, unsweetened, immediate. I'm drawn to the eerie and the beautiful, capturing fleeting moments where strangeness and truth quietly coexist.
Influenced by cinematic worlds that blur reality and surrealism, I gravitate toward the uncanny hidden in everyday life. Rooted in my Latina identity yet expansive in scope, my work centers authenticity while amplifying underrepresented voices. Nothing is overworked, nothing forced, just fragments of real life, preserved as they appeared, and as they were felt.
projects & Media
Film is a space where I like to contribute pieces of voice and vision rather than steer the whole project myself — I first brought that to Boys Don't Cry with a voiceover I wrote, quiet and emotionally precise beneath the surface, and more recently stepped deeper into storytelling by co-writing the script for Heaven with my creative partner, Trey Woodbine, exploring layered narratives shaped by experience and atmosphere. Alongside my film work, I contributed to social media and marketing for the Met's Teen Programming department, and covered the 2025 Met Gala press conference, creating media and conducting interviews.