Nice to meet you, I’m Maria

I am an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and floral installation designer based in the United States. My work explores how places shape people, and how people create meaningful places through care.

I am especially interested in the rituals and responsibilities behind belonging: how we prepare rooms, welcome strangers, gather around tables, tend to shared spaces, and participate in the communities that receive us. My current body of work, Room to Receive, investigates the spaces through which strangers become guests, and asks what responsibilities we inherit when a place makes room for us.

My practice brings together nonfiction writing, photography, site-responsive botanical installations, and shared gathering. It is shaped by my Greek-American inheritance of hospitality, my experience creating floral environments for large-scale immersive events, and years of travel and study across East Asia, where I continue to examine the relationship between design, social responsibility, ritual, and care.

My first job was at The Leonardo, a former science, technology, and art museum in Salt Lake City, where I contributed to exhibition installations while leading public relations and community outreach. That early experience taught me to see exhibitions as living conversations between ideas, objects, spaces, and the communities they invite in — an understanding that still shapes how I think about art, gathering, and public experience.