Maxine
NYC-Based Multimedia Artist & storyteller
Maxine Barbosa
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.
Writing
Maxine 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. Maxine approaches film and photography as a way of seeing things exactly as they are: unfiltered, unsweetened, and immediate. Drawn to the eerie and the beautiful, her work captures fleeting moments at first glance, where strangeness and truth quietly coexist.
Influenced by cinematic worlds that blur reality and surrealism, she gravitates toward the uncanny hidden in everyday life. Rooted in her Latina identity yet expansive in scope, her work centers authenticity while intentionally amplifying underrepresented voices. Nothing is overworked; nothing is forced, just fragments of real life, preserved as they appeared, and as they were felt.
projects & Media
Film, for Maxine, is a space where fragments of voice and vision come together to hold something lasting. In Boys Don’t Cry, she contributed voiceover writing that moves beneath the surface, quiet, reflective, and emotionally precise, guiding what isn’t always seen but is deeply felt.
In addition to her film work, Maxine contributed to social media and marketing in the Teen Programming department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she helped shape the museum’s youth-facing digital presence. She also attended the 2025 Met Gala press conference, creating media and conducting interviews that captured the event’s energy and artistic significance.
Heaven, her first major film project, marks a deeper step into storytelling as a co-written screenplay with her creative partner. Rooted in the same instinct for the raw and the real, the film explores layered narratives shaped by experience, atmosphere, and emotional truth, where meaning lingers beyond the frame.
Upcoming
“Te Llevo Conmigo” (TLC) is an upcoming physically printed, text-forward zine releasing in May that brings together writing and visual work centered on themes of identity, family, language, cultural memory, and emotional understanding. The project has evolved with a focus on amplifying the voices and creative expressions of people within the creator’s immediate community—friends and family—especially those who may not have access to formal artistic platforms or the resources often associated with being labeled an “artist.” In addition to the creator’s own writing and photography, the project expands its visual scope to include contributions and inspiration drawn from architecture, comic illustration, cooking, and photography, creating a layered and interdisciplinary body of work.
The zine adapts narratives from a larger book project alongside original reflective writing, prioritizing a dense, text-forward format that values literacy in a world shaped by speed and scrolling. At the same time, it is designed to remain accessible to both readers and non-readers, as well as Spanish and English speakers alike. Visually, the zine incorporates community-sourced imagery to interrupt and deepen the text, allowing the work to resonate through both language and image. Ultimately, the project functions as both an extension of the creator’s book and an independent artistic work rooted in shared voice, intimacy, and cultural expression.
Printed copies will be available in both English & Spanish.