Person walking a dog through a forest at sunset with tall trees and sunlight filtering through the branches.

Andrea is an American philosopher, author & educator with advanced degrees in philosophy & neuroscience (UGA, Humboldt Universität, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, currently a doctoral researcher with Universität Heidelberg in the philosophy faculty). Andrea also has an M.A. in world heritage (department of urban planning & civil engineering, Brandenburg University of Technology), and has worked on projects in transportation and technological development. She was a graduate student assistant at NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence at the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin & has been a researcher with the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig) and Northoff Lab (Ottawa). She is a board member and advisor, and founder of Making Ways and Love & Philosophy, a multimedia care collective dedicated to navigating complexity through philosophical inquiry. Andrea is the author of numerous books, including Thinking Small and Holding Paradox. Also check out the recent book Andrea co-authored with the She Writes AI community called AI Everywhere, available this Women’s Day.

“Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and educator in the cognitive sciences with advanced degrees in philosophy, neuroscience and world heritage (department of urban planning and civil engineering). She collaborates at the intersection of technology and philosophy, taking phenomenological and ecological approaches to intelligence and mobility, and forging paths beyond traditional scales.

Currently a researcher at numerous universities, she is also the author of various books, including Thinking Small and Holding Paradox (coming 2026). She has long worked on issues of motoring and mobility as a consultant, writer, and ghostwriter. Andrea has worked extensively for numerous museums, artists, collectors, and agencies. She is also developing the framework of Way-making and the practice of Navigability and is dedicated to empowering individuals, audiences and organizations to notice and build philosophical perspectives towards better personal & collective goals. Andrea has written about, and worked in, many diverse environments, from the Peace Corps to the transportation sector to university classrooms to neuroscience foundations and technology labs.

This experience and perspective allows her to expand traditional definitions of landscape and delve into human movement and transportive technology at scales beyond just the geographic. Just as importantly, however, it allows her to discuss and work towards a better understanding of how movement affects mental, emotional and imagined space.

She is also the founder of the Love and Philosophy project and works with Making Ways.”

Making Ways is a multimedia care collective dedicated to navigating complexity through paradox, connection, and philosophical inquiry. The company creates & hosts conversations, podcasts, books, and online materials that explore the vital practice of care—caring for ideas, relationships, communities, and the intricate webs that connect them all. At the heart of Making Ways is the Love & Philosophy podcast series, particularly the "Beyond Dichotomy" conversation stream, which explores what it means to think beyond binary oppositions. Through mostly unscripted dialogues across traditional divides, these conversations practice philosophy as a verb—engaging with topics like constellation thinking, planetary consciousness, embodied memory, and the care of things. The approach is kaleidoscopic: seeing multiple perspectives at once, holding tensions without collapsing them, and recognizing that truth often emerges not from choosing sides but from holding the space between them. Making Ways publishes accessible philosophical pamphlets and books, including the "Embracing Paradox" series—light guides for developing the capacity to hold seemingly contradictory ideas in mind at once while maintaining motivation and meaning in troubled times. These materials bridge rigorous academic thought with lived experience, making complex philosophical and scientific ideas relevant to everyday navigation. The company's work is grounded in what founder Andrea Hiott calls the "waymaking" or "navigational approach"—understanding cognition, consciousness, and care as dynamic processes of orientation and relating. From discussions of interbrain synchrony to radical embodied memory, from double consciousness to planetary cognitive ecology, Making Ways creates spaces where public care, philosophical rigor, & genuine curiosity meet. This is care work in the deepest sense: caring enough to think deeply, to listen across difference, to evolve our language and frameworks, creatig conversational paths

Personal Bio: All my life, I’ve been motivated towards the same goal: Finding ways to move beyond either/or mindsets, explore our multiplicity and connect the cognitive sciences in ways that are healthier for all minds everywhere. My academic research, public conversations, books, projects, podcasts, and philosophical approach (way-making) are all towards this same idea. Thank you for being interested in this, and for being here. Love, Andrea

Recent books: Holding Paradox: Navigational Approach to Mind, coming to US later this year

Recent paper: Radical Embodied Relation

A quick note about Way-making: Way-making can refer to cognition or movement, but it does not mean cognition and movement could ever be defined into one another. Still, having this term does make it easier to study ‘movement' and ‘cognition’ as patterns of the same process. Another way of saying it: We are not collapsing cognition and movement into one another, but rather showing them as different approaches of a shared processed, any assessment of which much be clearly linked to the regularities of context and to the path-dependency of whatever is being assessed.

Recent films and television series that I have been in include The Bug and Cars that Changed the World.

The following has not been updated since 2024. There are many more links since then which will be updted in time.

Recent podcast appearances include for Business Insider, for the Idea Cast Interview Series, for the Trailmark podcast, the Lucas Vos podcast, Karen Wong’s The Meaning Code and for the Connectomics podcast of the Okinawa Institute. Some conference papers from 2024 include a talk on Ecological Philosophy for the International Philosophy Conference in Rome, for the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment in Berlin, for the Cognitive Science Society at DUCOG, for the Modelling Cities workshop and the French Regional Conference on Complex Systems, for Livable Cities London, for Cities & Cultures in Barcelona, for the Radical Embodiment conference in Murcia, for the The Korean Society for the Philosophy of Science, and for the International Conference on Resilient Systems in Singapore, and early talks for the Modes of Existence in Oslo, at the Design Theory conferences at MINES in Paris, two talks for SEMF in Valencia, and for the International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind (ISPSM).

Andrea has written about speed, transportation, landscape,memory, art,and other communal projects. Her work appears in numerous publications such as the New York Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New York Post, Bloomburg, Huffington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Business Insider, the National Geographic, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. She has also appeared in numerous films and podcasts. Through agencies and commissions, she has ghostwritten books and worked extensively for various museums, artists, collectors, and agencies.

Andrea wrote her undergraduate thesis on Rorty, Bohm and Hegel with Richard Dien Winfield. She did my Master thesis with the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin as part of the Doeller Lab at the Max Planck Institute, and with the Northoff Lab which is located at the University of Ottawa. In this thesis, Andrea set out the preliminaries of a philosophy and neuroscience of waymaking, perspectival hippocampus research, and metricizing the stimulus in scientific experimentation. It can be read here: Ecological Memory. Other early sketches were presented at the 8th MindBrainBody Symposium, the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, as part of the Leibniz Institute for Spatial Social Research Spring Academy, and at the Urban Forest Forest Urbanisms Conference.

Some recent publications can be found at My Liveable City and Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology Part One and Part Two at the Landesmuseum Hannover and in Discourse Magazine. Some talks in 2023 about way-making include: the Max Planck Institute’s 10th Mind Body Brain Symposium in Berlin, the 4th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind in Braga, Portugal, the Society of Cognitive Science of the Moving Image in Wilmington, North Carolina, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Pittsburgh, and Livable Cities at CUNY City Tech in New York City (slides), for the ISHPBB in Toronto (Talk on Stotz and Cognitive Symbiology), for the Cognitive Science Society in Australia, the Society for Multidisciplinary Research in Valencia and Madrid, for the Klinkum Heidelberg, and for the International Philosophy of Mind Conference. Andrea has also given talks for companies interested in applying this cognitive model to their business practices and is on the board of various companies internationally.

Ecological Motoring Initiative writings can be found on the EMI Substack. Those of you who are interested in the subjects of Desirable Unknown (nature, environment) please find further writings and community here. For those who want to go deeper into phenomenology & philosophy (via themes relative to the Love & Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy channel and the Way-making framework), join the secrete Substack Community Philosophy.

Love & Philosophy Research channel

Love and Philosophy Substack

Way-making 

Ecological Motoring Initiative.

Audio podcast links

Future Motoring with the Ecological Motoring Initiative

Bibliography of Andrea Hiott

I. BOOKS

Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle Hiott, A. (2012). Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle. New York: Ballantine Books / Random House. ISBN: 978-0-345-52142-2.

Pensar en Pequeño (Spanish translation of Thinking Small) Hiott, A. Pensar en Pequeño. [Spanish-language edition.]

Porsche in Amerika Hiott, A. Porsche in Amerika. Stuttgart: Porsche Museum. ISBN: 978-3-613-30801-0.

Embracing Paradox: How to Keep Going When You Can't Hiott, A. (2025). Embracing Paradox: A Little Guide for the Times [44-page pamphlet; Part One of the Embracing Paradox series]. Making Ways.

Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness (& Other Gifts from the Hippocampus) Hiott, A. (2026). Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness & Other Gifts from the Hippocampus. Winchester/Washington DC: Iff Books (Collective Ink). [Published in UK; forthcoming in US via same imprint.]

How to Be Alive (forthcoming) Hiott, A. (forthcoming). How to Be Alive. New York: HarperOne.

II. EDITED VOLUMES & CO-AUTHORED BOOKS

AI Everywhere, Volume 1: How Women Are Changing the World with Artificial Intelligence Smiley, K., Hiott, A., Okpala, B. C., et al. (2025). AI Everywhere, Volume 1: How Women Are Changing the World with Artificial Intelligence. She Writes AI Community.

Tobias Zielony: Manitoba Zielony, T. (Photographer), & Hiott, A. (Contributor). Tobias Zielony: Manitoba. [Photography book with an essay by Hiott.]

Love & Philosophy: Beyond Dichotomy Hiott, A. Love & Philosophy: Beyond Dichotomy. Making Ways.

Berlin Interviews: The Book Hiott, A. Berlin Interviews: The Book. [Listed on Academia.edu.]

III. PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES & RESEARCH PAPERS

Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating Hiott, A. (2025). "Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating." Topoi (Special Issue: Progress in Radical Embodiment). Springer Nature. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18290.79046. Available: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-025-10256-7

Universal Measure of Control in the Perception-Action Loop (co-authored) [Hiott, A., et al.] (2025). "Universal Measure of Control in the Perception-Action Loop." Complex Systems Society.

Cognitions as Navigabilities: A Philosophical Invitation and Experimentation towards Modelling Cognitions Hiott, A. (2024). "Cognitions as Navigabilities: A philosophical invitation and experimentation towards modelling cognitions." FRCCS – French Regional Conference on Complex Systems / International Complex Systems Conference. [Also listed as: "Cognitions as Navigabilities: An Invitation Towards Pluralistic Computational Modelling."]

Navigability: A Common Orientation for the Study of Cognition Hiott, A. (2024). "Navigability: A common orientation for the study of cognition."

Waymaking: A Nested Approach to Cognition Inspired by Cognitive and Computational Hippocampal Models Hiott, A. (2023). "Waymaking: a nested approach to cognition inspired by cognitive and computational hippocampal models." Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023). eScholarship. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4s064867

Mind in the City: From Walkability to Way-ability Hiott, A. (2023). "Mind in the City: From Walkability to Way-ability." My Liveable City (Jan–Mar 2023), 50. [Also published as Urban Blueprint, ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378157812]

Minding Cities: Why a City's Way-ability is the Key to its Cognitive Affordances Hiott, A. (2023). "Minding cities: Why a city's way-ability is the key to its cognitive affordances." Livable Cities New York (CUNY City Tech). Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/119118415

Ecological Memory: The Spatiotemporal Commons of Conceptual and Physical Navigation Hiott, A. (2022). Ecological Memory: the spatiotemporal commons of conceptual and physical navigation [Master's thesis / research paper]. Humboldt Universität zu Berlin / Berlin School of Mind and Brain, in collaboration with the Doeller Lab (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences) and the Northoff Lab (University of Ottawa). ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361114681

Vom Gefühl, lebendig zu sein: Eine Philosophie der Beschleunigung (German) Hiott, A. "Vom Gefühl, lebendig zu sein: Eine Philosophie der Beschleunigung [The Feeling of Being Alive: A Philosophy of Acceleration/Speed]." ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380164512

IV. BOOK CHAPTERS, ESSAYS & JOURNAL CONTRIBUTIONS

Review of Iain McGilchrist's The Matter with Things Hiott, A. (2024). [Review essay.] Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology, Vol. 35 (Winter/Spring 2024). [Listed as "Cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott reviews psychotherapist Iain McGilchrist's The Matter with Things."]

"Mind in the City" (Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology) Hiott, A. (2023). Essay on cities and cognition. Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology (Winter/Spring 2023, Part One). Available: https://squid-dragonfly-cmd9.squarespace.com/s/Environmental-Architectural-Phenomenology-Hiott-Winter-Spring-2023.pdf

"Mind in the City" (Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology, Part Two) Hiott, A. (2024). Essay on cities and cognition, continued. Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology (Vol. 35, No. 1). Available: https://squid-dragonfly-cmd9.squarespace.com/s/EAP-Edited-95-24-wint-spr-35_1.pdf

Essay on Landscape and World Heritage Hiott, A. Essay on landscape. Published in conjunction with the Landesmuseum Hannover. Available: https://squid-dragonfly-cmd9.squarespace.com/s/UB_andreahoitt.pdf

Essay on Speed / Philosophy of Acceleration Hiott, A. Essay on speed. Hall Art Foundation (Tempo Tempo Tempo exhibition publication). http://www.hallartfoundation.org/exhibition/tempo-tempo-tempo/publications

Essay for the Land Art Mongolia Catalogue Hiott, A. (2014). Essay. Land Art Mongolia Catalogue 2014. http://www.landartmongolia.com/images/archiv/LAM-catalog_2014.pdf

Essay in Discourse Magazine (Heritage) Hiott, A. Essay. Discourse: The Heritage Magazine. Available: https://squid-dragonfly-cmd9.squarespace.com/s/3-ReducedSize-DISCOURSE-The-Heritage-Magazine.pdf

Essay for Manitoba book (KOW Berlin) Hiott, A. Essay in Tobias Zielony: Manitoba [accompanying the book release at KOW Berlin gallery]. https://kow-berlin.com/events/manitoba-book-release

Cognitive Symbiology and Way-Making (conference paper) Hiott, A. (2023). "Cognitive Symbiology and Way-Making." Presented at the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), Toronto. Slides: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d0e758ebcdca40001f9ffde/t/64dcc7c5e718bd71dc9e1486/1692190676621/CognitiveSymbiologyAndreaHiottWayMaking.pdf

V. CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS & TALKS

2021 (Early / Pre-publication talks)

2023

2024

VI. JOURNALISM, ESSAYS & POPULAR PRESS

Hiott has written for and been featured in numerous publications, including:

VII. FILM & MEDIA APPEARANCES

VIII. PODCASTS

  • Love & Philosophy (host; Making Ways / Substack podcast series)

  • Business Insider podcast — "Brought to You By: VW Beetle"

  • Idea Cast Interview Series

  • Trailmark Podcast

  • Lucas Vos Podcast

  • The Meaning Code (with Karen Wong)

  • Connectomics Podcast, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

IX. ACADEMIC AFFILIATIONS & INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT

Hiott has conducted research with or presented at:

  • University of Georgia (B.A. in Philosophy; undergraduate thesis on Rorty, Bohm, and Hegel, supervised by Prof. Richard Dien Winfield)

  • Humboldt Universität zu Berlin / Berlin School of Mind and Brain (M.A.)

  • Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig (Doeller Lab)

  • Northoff Lab, University of Ottawa

  • NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin

  • Brandenburg University of Technology (M.A., World Heritage / Urban Planning)

  • Universität Heidelberg, Philosophy Faculty (current doctoral researcher)

Compiled June 2026. Sources: andreahiott.com, Academia.edu (hu-berlin.academia.edu/AndreaHiott), ResearchGate, Goodreads, Penguin Random House, Iff Books/Collective Ink, eScholarship, Springer Nature, and author-provided information.

https://sites.utu.fi/agencyproject/2026-agential-capacities-in-context-workshop/

Black and white portrait of a woman with long hair, smiling, outdoors.

There was also a time when I wrote poetry in New York. I also co-founded a print publication and interdisciplinary project called Pulse, part of which can be found online in the archive.