Marina Kassianidou

Marina Kassianidou’s current practice combines painting, drawing, collage, installation, site-specific work, and writing. She experiments with everyday surfaces and spaces, looking for marks that respond to the features of each surface/space.

Her research focuses on marking as a means of enacting subjectivity and exploring relations between self and other, that is, exploring who we are and how we interact with materials, spaces, and the world at large.

She graduated from Stanford University, where she was a CASP/Fulbright scholar, with degrees in Studio Art and Computer Science. She obtained an M.A. in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, UK. She completed a Ph.D. in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, London, UK, in 2015. Her dissertation explored responsive modes of marking through artistic research, theoretical research in the fields of poststructuralist philosophy and feminist psychoanalytic theory, and primary research on the work of contemporary artists Louise Hopkins, Susan Collis and Bracha Ettinger.

She has exhibited her work in Europe and the US. She has had solo exhibitions in Nicosia, Cyprus (Gloria Gallery, Thkio Ppalies Artist-Led Project Space), London, UK (Tenderpixel Gallery, Chelsea College of Arts, The Center for Drawing) and Chicago, Illinois (North Branch Projects). Her work is found in several private and public collections, including the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture.

Selected awards include grants from the A. G. Leventis Foundation and fellowships at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, and Ragdale Foundation.

She has participated in conferences in Europe and the USA and her writings have appeared in the journals RevistArquis, The International Journal of the Image, and Journal of Contemporary Painting, among others.