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. In staged landscapes populated by human-animal figures, exposed skeletons, protective coloured skins, and  animal companions, she examines how identity and belonging are formed through unstable relations among bodies, species, and environments.

Often bearing the artist’s own face, her figures situate the self within a field of interdependence in which human, animal, and environment continually reshape one another. Vulnerability and protection, life-mortality and transformation, control and chaos coexist within these bodies.
Their hybrid anatomies resist immediate classification and raise questions about what a body or self is, where it belongs, how it is recognised and how it is read.  Through hybridity, Roza unsettles the impulse to separate, measure, and fix living forms into stable categories.

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 for her work based on the theme Geography is Destiny. 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.