Marina Ross, M.F.A.

About

Marina Ross (she/her) is an exhibiting artist and instructor who has taught since 2015 at universities including the University of Iowa, Mount Mercy University, National Louis University and Roosevelt University.

Born in 1990 in the former Soviet Union, her family immigrated to Chicago when she was a child. As a Russian-Jewish immigrant, Ross draws upon her experience of acculturation, The American Dream, and the trauma that is inherently embedded within this. Traditional feminine beauty, one where a woman needs only to be polished and refined, was strongly enforced/encouraged as a form of social capital, assimilation, and protection. These notions of power and control of the feminine body and the performance of femininity saturate Ross’s work. In the summer of 2022, Ross lost her only son, Rafi, to a tragic accident, heightening her relation to loss and the fragility of the body. Her most recent work uses the Wizard of Oz as a framework to explore the desire to transcend beyond trauma. 

Portfolio of work and more info. can be found at www.marina-ross.com

Degrees

MFA, University of Iowa 
BFA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign