Maile Costa Colbert is an intermedia artist, researcher, and educator whose work focuses on sound and time-based media. She was a PhD Research Fellow in Artistic Studies, with a concentration in sound studies, cinematic sound design, and its relationship to soundscape ecology, at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University Lisbon, supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. Her practice-based research project, “Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place”, asks what we might gather from sounding the past.
She is an invited Assistant Professor of Multimedia at the Faculty of Fine Arts of The University of Lisbon, and a researcher at CineLab, IFILNOVA’s research laboratory for cinema and philosophy. There, she completed a postdoctoral project exploring the theme of Artificial Atmospheres, AI, art, and archives within the Art and Technology working group. She is a board member of the art and culture organisation Binaural Nodar, where she serves as Digital Archive Curator. She is also an editor and author at Sonic Field and a founding member of the Ecocinemas workgroup of the Association of Moving Image Researchers.
She has exhibited, screened, and performed internationally at venues and festivals including the New York Film Festival, the Ear to Earth Festival for Electronic Music, LACE Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Serralves em Festa in Porto, REDCAT, Contact in Tokyo, the Every Woman Biennial Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival, among others.
She has designed sound and composed music for various films, including Irene Lusztig’s Yours in Sisterhood, The Motherhood Archives, and Richland; Rebecca Baron’s How Little We Know of Our Neighbors; Adele Horne’s The Tailenders; Isabelle Carbonell’s The Blessed Assurance; Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s The American Sector; and Allan Sekula’s The Lottery of the Sea. She has also worked on Trang Tran’s multi-channel video installation Movements: Battles and Solidarity.
