MARIA MARTINEZ-CAÑAS was born in Havana. She received a BFA in photography from the Philadelphia College of Art and an MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. An artist who works with innovative, nontraditional photographic media, she has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad, with 51 one-person exhibitions and more than 300 group exhibitions. She is the recipient of the Oolite Arts Michael Richards Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation photography fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation 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, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Walker Art Center, among many others. Her works are represented by Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami. She has lived and worked in Miami since 1986.