Maria Roza (b. 1998, Baku) is a contemporary painter living and working in Turkey. Her practice approaches hybridity as both a way of seeing and a means of constructing the body. Centering human-animal figures, coloured skins that exposing skeletons and animal companions in staged landscapes, she examines how identity and belonging are formed through relations between human and nonhuman life. Drawing on  ecological entanglement and systems of control, she treats the self not as fixed or autonomous but as relational which continuously shaped through contact with otherness.  Her paintings hold care and threat, belonging and exclusion as well as intimacy and control within the same image, using a restrained but vivid visual language to question human exceptionalism and the violence of classification.

She began her formal art education at Ankara Fine Arts High School, graduating in 2016. She studied Painting at Hacettepe University, graduating with high honors, and later completed her Master’s degree at the same institution, focusing her research on hybrid creatures and their representations in contemporary art.

Her first solo exhibition, Hamartia, took place in 2019 in Ankara. In 2020, she received recognition from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s 6th Young Art Project Competition. In 2022, she joined the Le Maison de Barbara artist residency program and held her second solo exhibition, Parallel Animals, at Istanbul Concept Gallery, which now represents her practice. Her third solo exhibition, Primal Dialogues (2024), was presented at the Eskişehir Glass Museum and Istanbul Concept Gallery.

Her works have been exhibited at CerModern, Pera Palace, and SALT Beyoğlu, as well as internationally in Beirut and Kyiv. She has also participated in art fairs including Artweeks, ArtAnkara, ArtContact and the Love 360 Festival.