Maria Martinez-Cañas was born in Havana, Cuba. She received a B.F.A. in Photography from the Philadelphia College of Art and an M.F.A. in Photography from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. An artist who works with innovative, non-traditional photographic media, she has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, with 49 one-person exhibitions and over 300 group exhibitions. She is the recipient of the Oolite Arts 2020 Michael Richards Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation 2016 Photography Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation 2014 Visual Arts Fellowship, a Cintas Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Arts award; and a Fulbright-Hays Grant, among others. Her works are included in the permanent collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco; The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona; and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; among many others. Her works are represented by Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, and Julie Saul Projects, New York. She lives and works in Miami since 1986.