Mariana Aboim has a background in Sculpture, street activism, Art Education, and in 2024 she obtained a PhD from the Arts and Humanities department at the Royal College of Art in London, United Kingdom.

Mariana’s practice-led research investigates the affective and embodied materializations of long- term endurance of cisheteronormative structures. Mariana uses a recorded [spoken] word component that exercises speculative non-fiction as genre, articulating what she calls material intangibilities to challenge the tendentious ways in which thecorroborability of experiences is still dominated by western centered frameworks. Mariana conducts her investigation through an assemblic production of moving and still image, deploying methods that allow working with the viscerality of affect on practice-based approaches to what it can mean to draw theories with fine art [rather than about fine art]. Mariana further proposes how exploring nonconscious semiotic affective processes through ‘practice’ reveals paths working towards absent non-hetero futurities being materialized in the present.

Mariana tutors at the Willem de Kooning Academy since 2015, working on the Fine Art bachelor and Autonomous Practices, and she has joined the Miard team in September 2025.