About
“It was my great luck to grow up in an international environment. By the age of 10, I spoke four languages and my friends at school were from all over the world. Coexistence meant inspiration, not conflict. This experience helped me realize very quickly that the world was bigger than just my environment and they were people living far away, speaking various languages. This environment shaped the person I came to be and gradually led me to documentary photography.”
Having started photography as a Set Photographer in numerous feature film productions, today Maria’s work focuses on people’s exclusion from the social system as a result of belonging to minority social groups. Based in Geneva/Switzerland but travelling often to Greece, she has been documenting since July 2015, the daily life of teen girls residing in state institutions.
Member of Concrete Collective, a group of 5 documentary photographers based in five different countries around the world and co-founder of M55Reports, a Residency Project involving 12 documentary photographers covering various aspects of an issue by travelling all together at the same location. In 2015 and 2016 the team was hosted in Athens, in 2017 in London for the Brexit and in Reykjavic for the recovery of the crisis in Iceland.
Maria also runs workshops for pre-teens and teens in France and Switzerland on tailored-made themes. In 2016, she designed a workshop on suggesting alternative ways of using photography in the social media. The content of these workshops is directly related to online identity and digital reputation. In dec 2017, Maria joined as an active member, the Swiss association Cybercoachs.ch
Certified trainer by Photovoice.org/London in Participatory Photography.
Represented by Divergence-images.com in France & Regardirect.ch in Switzerland.
Holds an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography obtained at the University of the Arts from the London School of Communication (LCC), an MSc in Marketing Management from The Salford Business School in Manchester, a Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing and a BSc in Computer Information Systems. Maria speaks fluent French, English, Greek, Spanish and gets by in Italian and German.