Maya Gayer is a journalist, content editor, and program director with over two decades of experience in the media field.
Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Maya has spent the past decade as a senior director of programming and content editor at GLZ Radio, a public station with one of the largest audiences in the country. She served as the editor-in-chief of The Broadcast University, one of the station’s flagship programs, which hosted top Israeli scholars for talks on a wide array of topics. Maya created series dedicated to subjects such as democracy, the climate crisis, feminism, religion and state, and immigration. She is also the co-editor of the program's book series.
As senior director of programming at GLZ, she was responsible for the station's Holocaust Remembrance Day broadcasts. Preserving and shaping collective memory in this framework sparked her initial interest in oral history. In recent years, Maya established and directed the Persitz Program in Arts Management at the Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipality and was the head content editor of the science documentary series The Future is Already Here, which aired on KAN (Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation). Additionally, she taught radio and podcast production at Sapir Academic College and the University of Haifa.
Maya holds an MA, Magna Cum Laude, and a BFA, Summa Cum Laude, in Film and Television studies from Tel Aviv University. She was awarded the Fulbright Fellowship in Public Humanities to pursue an MA in Columbia University’s Oral History Program. For her thesis project, she created an oral history archive of the Israeli Democracy Protest Movement, the largest grassroots movement in Israeli history, which operated through 2023 in response to the government's attempts to overhaul the judicial system.
Through interviews with more than 20 of its leading organizers, the archive aims to preserve the history of this pivotal moment in Israeli society and contribute to the study of democratic backsliding and civil resistance, offering a critical case study for other societies facing similar challenges. The archive is intended to be preserved in the Israel National Library and the Judaica and Hebraica Collections at Stanford University.
