About the Artist

Marina Orlova is a multidisciplinary artist, mother, and former YouTube phenomenon whose journey from “the world’s sexiest philologist” to radical visual truth-teller maps the very contradictions her art now dismantles. With two degrees in philology and over 500 million views on her acclaimed series HotForWords, Marina built an empire on words—making language viral, seductive, and dangerous. She became a paradox made flesh: a scholar in stilettos, teaching etymology with the sharpness of a blade and the polish of a pin-up.

But Marina didn’t stay in the spotlight to entertain. She turned it inside out.

Fleeing Putin’s Russia in 2002, she now uses art not as escape, but resistance. As a single mother of two young children, Marina creates with urgency—exposing the capitalist, patriarchal, and religious systems that condition kids to suppress emotion, glorify war, and call obedience survival. Her work is a cry against a world that asks children to become avatars instead of humans, soldiers instead of dreamers.

She has already influenced millions with words. Now, she uses images to fight for what words alone can’t save.

Her paintings, performances, and video art—such as Birthing a Bomb (which won 1st Prize at the 2023 London Art Biennale), Tasty Period, Murder She Wrote, and Yoni in Revelation—bleed with visceral symbolism: dolls become relics, Barbie becomes prophet, and the innocence of childhood becomes a sacred battleground.

Marina’s work is not polite, not passive, and not for sale to systems that harm.

She’s no longer here to seduce the world.

She’s here to protect what’s still pure in it—

and burn down everything that isn’t.

Featured by The New Yorker, New York Times, Bloomberg, Los Angeles Times, NBC’s Last Call with Carson Daly, The Early Morning Show on CBS News, Fox News O'Reilly Factor Show, Moscow Times, Cosmopolitan, Complex, Wired, Spiegel and more.

CONTACT

art@hotforwords.com

About the Artist

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