Maja Zawierzeniec

For the last 15 years, Maja Zawierzeniec has been engaging, first instinctively and intuitively, then with progressing insight, in the concepts of conscious education, entanglements between art, creativity and communication, applied to learning and teaching, and the incorporation of modern technologies and self-awareness in the 21st century high education and leadership in multicultural projects.

For most of her secondary school teachers in post-communist Poland, Maja was a somewhat rebellious student, and to the vast majority of her peers she was an introvert empollón teen. Following her linguistic and sociocultural vocation, Maja proceeded to study at the Institute of Iberian and Iberoamerican studies at Warsaw University, where she first received her MA diploma, and then at the age of 27 was awarded a Ph.D.

With her first expedition to Mexico, in 2001, a passion exploded within Maja to embrace the land of one of the world’s most splendorous civilizations, and a refuge to many an artist and intellectual over the siglos. Since then, she has returned “home” several times for scholarships, cultural projects, as well as independent cultural and academic journeys.

Unclassifiable, with insolent mini-dresses in formal academic meetings and conferences, Maja raises sense-of-life topics where otherwise small talk would prevail. She has professional experience in a wide variety of backgrounds including intercultural academic and business projects.

As an academic, Maja is a total Mexicanist: she started her academic work with contemporary women writers, and currently works on Mexican contemporary art. Nevertheless, she has engaged in a number of parallel investigations, concerning mostly the analysis and influence of other important cultural zones or communities in Latin America. These include themes such as Judeo Latin American literature and art and cultural relations between China and Latin America.

Maja cooperates with Warsaw University (Centre of Latin American Studies, Centre for Open and Multimedia Education, and School of Oriental Studies) and is the head of the Spanish Philology Department at Wszechnica Polska Superior School based in Warsaw.

She is also a TEDxMarszałkowska organizer and a former TEDxWarsawWomen speaker.