Marina Berio is a visual artist from New York working with drawings and photography to convey aspects of visual experience that are intimate and visceral. She has printed family pictures with her own blood and rendered photographic negatives as large-scale charcoal drawings. “The Space in the Mind in the Body in the Space,” her long-term photographic project, is shot on the walls of her studio and expresses the interrelationship between the nested realities of mental space, creative process, the internal topography of the body, and the surfaces of the studio itself.
She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock/Krasner Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Award. She’s attended residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Millay in the U.S., Schloss Plüschow in Germany, and Shiro Oni in Japan. Her work was included in a large historical survey of materiality in photography at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; and she has had solo shows at Galerie Miranda in Paris, France; Galería Phuyu in Buenos Aires; Michael Steinberg Fine Art, and the OFF Triennale in Germany.
She’s a founding member of PAIN, the activist group headed by Nan Goldin that staged actions holding the Sackler family accountable for their role in creating the opioid crisis, and profiled in the Laura Poitras film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Berio teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York, lives in Far Rockaway, and her studio is in Brooklyn.
At MacDowell in 2015, Berio worked on a series of photographs about what happens on her studio walls as she makes drawings and simple paper objects. The pictures began serving as aides-memoire to process, and became a project in their own right.
During her 2025 residency, Berio worked on three projects. She designed an exhibition to be held at RISE in Rockaway, NY, presenting her recently published artist book Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President, for which she received a Queens Art Fund grant; worked on gum bichromate prints using unorthodox pigments to accompany some of her drawings in a group show opening at Seizan Gallery in Chelsea, NYC; and worked on her long-term project “The Space in the Mind in the Body in the Space."
