Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and the director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. She leads research initiatives such as “Automated Landscapes,” focusing on the emerging architectures of automated labor. Recently, she curated the exhibition Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective by Jonas Staal (2018), and co-curated the exhibitions “I See That I See What You Don’t See” at La XXII Triennale Di Milano (2019), and Malware: Symptoms of Viral Infection (2019).

Otero is part of the Artistic Team for Manifesta 13 in Marseille (2020). Previously, she was the curator of “Work, Body, Leisure,” the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), Chief Curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale together with the After Belonging Agency, and the director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X- Columbia University GSAPP (New York). Otero is a co-editor of Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay In Transit (2016),Architecture of Appropriation: squatting as spatial practice (2019), and editor of Work, Body, Leisure (2018).

She teaches at the RCA in London, and has taught seminars and studios at ETSAM, Barnard College, and Columbia GSAPP, among others. Otero studied architecture at TU Delft and ETSA Madrid. In 2013, as a Fulbright Scholar, she graduated from the M.S. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. She completed her PhD at ETSAM in 2016. Her thesis ‘Evanescent Institutions‘ examines the emergence of new paradigms for cultural institutions, and in particular the political implications of temporal and itinerant structures.