Maia Iotzova is a filmmaker and a media artist who grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria. She immigrated to Canada and in 2002 she completed a BA in Fine Arts at the University of Guelph. As a child Maia developed a strong connection to urban nature while playing in the wild fields growing between the buildings of the soviet style complex where she lived. This intimate relationship drew the trajectory of her creative practice. In 2004 she directed the film Grass Through Concrete (72 min), chronicling the fight of a community to preserve one of Canada’s largest urban parks. In 2014 she released the author film Green Dream (50 min), tracing the evolution of her personal relationship with urban nature, from her childhood in Sofia to her adult life in Montreal. She started to experiment with ways of subverting traditional mapping techniques in order to capture the significance of urban green spaces to the community. In 2014 along with 3 other collaborator she formed The Wild City Mapping Collective to compile a creative open-source map of the wild green spaces in Montreal. Her dream is to one day bring this project to her home city of Sofia. Maia is passionate about raising the profile of women in the film and creative media industry and she has been a co-host of the XX Files Radio Show since 2010.
21 January 2016
27 February 2015
