Christina (Chryse) Maile is visual artist, landscape architect, writer, and co-founding member of Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective. Maile contributed numerous works to the Collective’s Off-Broadway productions. Her credits include: RAPE IN (1971), ACROSS THE STREET (1971), MUSEUM OF MANNEQUINS as part of the WESTBETH CABARET (1972), ANIMAL MONOLOGUES (1972), BODIES (1972), FRANKLIN’S BRIDE from WICKED WOMEN (1973), and INTELLIGENT LIFE OF THE UNIVERSE from WE CAN FEED EVERYBODY HERE (1974).

Christina (Chryse) Maile was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to West Indian and Dayak parents. Her work has been influenced by the cultural traditions of her family especially in the form of storytelling by her grandmother and father, which she in turn relayed to her brothers and sisters as bedtime stories leavened with drama, fantasy, and the supernatural. 

She attended Oakland University in Michigan, then returned to New York’s East Village and gained a degree from Hunter College in Medieval History. In 1970, at the suggestion of Tod Williams, the architect who was working at Richard Meier’s office at the time, she and her first  husband, a painter,  submitted applications to  Westbeth Artist Housing.  Upon moving in, she helped start a mothers’ cooperative that provided shared child care to   each other’s children.  She was then free to join with 6 other playwrights in co-founding the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective. 

After the group officially disbanded in 1975, Maile returned to school and became a licensed landscape architect, eventually becoming Deputy Director of Manhattan Construction for the NYC Dept of Parks.  In later years, she has become a  printmaker and a painter,  and has received several grants from various foundations, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and  the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2015 she won the Miriam Chaikin Writing Foundation award for writing.  Her work is in numerous private collections, and is included in the Feminist Project exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.  

Recently using reclaimed wood from demolished buildings, she has begun constructing houses for solitary bees in order to attract attention to the increasing loss of their habitat.

She is currently part of writing and performing group called Stories Around the Table which includes Shami Chaikin. Twice a year they give performances which are both improvised and scripted.

At present, Maile is on the Board of Directors of the Westbeth Artists Housing Corporation.

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