Biography

Maya Georgieva is a futurist, XR/ Metaverse strategist, immersive storyteller, producer, and a sought-after keynote speaker on the future of Immersive Learning and Innovation. Her most recent work focuses on innovation, the metaverse, immersive storytelling, VR/AR experiences, design thinking, and digital strategy. Maya actively writes and speaks on the topics of digital transformation, the metaverse, immersive storytelling, and the future of learning, creativity, and work and consults organizations and startups in this space. She is an XR producer and serves as a judge and coach to several competitions and accelerator programs.

At The New School, She works to engage the community and provide strategic leadership in creating an institutional culture and capacity for innovative design with emerging technologies. Maya works closely with the CIO, the Vice Provost for Curriculum and Learning, university academic groups and faculty in the design, development, management and evaluation of new digital initiatives across the five colleges Parsons School of Design, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the College of Performing Arts, The New School for Social Research and the Schools of Public Engagement.

Maya leads a team driving new media and innovation focused on immersive storytelling, spatial computing, future interfaces, and design. She teaches the Immersive Storytelling course and regularly guest-teaches at The Parsons School of Design. Her work has been featured at SXSW, the MIT Media Lab, The Atlantic, The Economist, and the Fulbright Program among others.  She served as an Innovator In Residence at ShapingEDU, Arizona State University. Maya is the co-author of the State of XR and Immersive Learning report. She is the co-author of the pioneering EDUCAUSE series, VR and AR: Stepping into the New Frontier of Learning and has authored white papers on the future of Higher Education and Immersive Learning.

She is also the co-founder of Digital Bodies, a global consulting group focusing on the impact of immersive virtual reality and wearable technologies on education and society. She sits on a number of educational and corporate learning boards and is a member of the Expert Panel for the New Media Consortium Horizon Report for Higher Education. Maya has been instrumental in developing partnerships within and outside of higher education with startups, corporate and non-government organizations. Maya speaks frequently at national and international forums on innovation and the future of education and consult startups in this space.

Previously she was the Director of Education Futures at The New School. Early on, Maya led Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the Stern School of Business, New York University. Maya provided strategic leadership to advance academic initiatives that transformed the teaching-learning environment. She spearheaded the implementation of instructional design and mobille and socila technology, learning space design, blended and online learning, digital storytelling and faculty development and special programs initiatives. Her work and projects focused on design thinking and the innovative use of immersive and mobile technology  to foster higher levels of student engagement.

Maya is the recipient of the 2014 Campus Tech Education Futurist Award. Watch Maya’s Five Minutes of Fame talk on innovation in education delivered at the 2013 New Media Consortium. In 2014, Maya was invited to deliver her second Five Minutes of Fame talk at NMC with focus on the design of new learning experiences and the future of education. Her work has been featured at EDUCAUSE, ELI, New Media Consortium (NMC), Online Learning Consortium (OLC) , EdMEDIA, Campus Technology, GMAC, AACSB, SXSW, Google and Intel Engage Education. In 2010 – 2011, in partnership with XanEdu Publishing Maya lead the iPad pilot initiative at Stern. The project was recognized with the Campus Technology Innovator Award for designing a student centered iPad App.