About the Artist

Marina Orlova is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines the intersections of the body, belief systems, and power through large-scale mixed media, collage, performance documentation, and installation.

Orlova began her formal art education at age thirteen at a provincial art school in Arzamas, Russia, graduating at seventeen. The city is historically associated with Aleksandr Vasil’evich Stupin, founder of the first provincial painting school in Russia, and this early academic training emphasized classical draftsmanship, compositional rigor, and disciplined visual study.

After relocating to the United States in 2002, Orlova expanded her practice through language, media theory, and mass-communication platforms. She is also a trained philologist and became widely known in the late 2000s as the creator of HotForWords, a digital series examining language origins and cultural meaning. While operating within popular media, this work functioned as an early investigation into performance, authorship, and the commodification of knowledge—concerns that continue to inform her contemporary visual practice.

Orlova’s current work engages religious iconography, consumer symbolism, childhood artifacts, and autobiographical material to interrogate systems that regulate femininity, innocence, and value. Her practice positions the body as both subject and site—where ideology, faith, and power are inscribed, contested, and reassembled.

She lives and works in the United States.