Daniela Mayer is an independent researcher, curator, and educator based in New York.

Mayer’s research interests revolve around transnational art networks and visual culture between the Americas during the mid-twentieth century, as well as the intersections between identity and various socio-political histories. She is an adjunct lecturer of art history at Hunter College and the curator of Cosmic Shelter: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Private Cosmococas at the Hunter College Art Galleries in New York. The exhibition, which runs from October 12, 2023 to March 30, 2024, features the United States premiere of two unique installations from the Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa — Programa in Progress series by the namesake Brazilian artists. As a complement to the exhibition, Mayer led a two-semester curatorial practicum for graduate students in Hunter’s Art and Art History department. Cosmic Shelter was born out of Mayer’s 2021 master’s thesis, “An Outlaw in Babylon: Hélio Oiticica’s Transgressive Strategies in the Margins of New York, 1970–1978,” which examines the artist’s marginality-inspired practice during his self-exilic period in New York City alongside various political and countercultural movements. In March 2022, Mayer presented on the influence of Underground filmmakers and queer politics on Oiticica’s cinema projects at the This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975 conference hosted by the Americas Society and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).