Marina Otero Verzier is an architect based in Rotterdam. She is Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut, where she leads research initiatives such as ‘Automated Landscapes,’ focusing on the emerging architectures of automated labour, and ‘Architecture of Appropriation,’ on squatting as spatial practice.

Otero is the Curator of WORK, BODY, LEISURE, the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th Venice International Architecture Biennale in 2018. With the After Belonging Agency, Otero was Chief Curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016, which addressed the implications of architecture in contemporary processes of displacement and identity construction.

From 2011-2015 Otero was based in New York. She was Director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, a global network of research laboratories for exploring the future of the built environment, which was launched by the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in 2008.

Her work, recently awarded by The Graham Foundation, Design Trust, and the FAD Thought and Criticism Award, has been published in different books and journals. Otero has co-edited Promiscuous Encounters (GSAPP Books, 2014), Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (Dpr-Barcelona, 2016), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay In Transit (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016).

She currently teaches at ETSA Madrid and Royal College of Art in London, and has taught seminars and studios at ETSAM, Barnard College, and Columbia GSAPP. 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 a new paradigms for cultural institutions, and in particular the political implications of temporal and itinerant structures.