Maryna Semenkova is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, photographer, and researcher working across the fields of memory, displacement, eco-mind feminism, and collective trauma.

Born in Ukraine, she has been living in exile since the full-scale invasion of 2022. Her artistic practice explores the female body as a political and poetic site, intertwining personal history with inherited trauma and broader questions of violence, identity, and survival.

Trained as a lawyer (MA in Law, State Academy of Law, Ukraine, 2005), Semenkova transitioned from a legal career into the arts, pursuing studies in photography, graphic design, and performance. From 2013 to 2016, she traveled extensively through South Asia as a photojournalist and cultural researcher, deepening her exploration of spiritual and existential dimensions of embodiment and exile.

Semenkova’s performances and photographic works have been presented at cultural institutions across Europe and the US, including Nelimarkka Museum (Finland), Somos Arts (Berlin), Gallery Huit and Les Rencontres de la Photographie (Arles, France), Ideal Glass Studio (New York), PhotoDoc (Paris), and Museum Schloss Schönhausen (Berlin). Her work often blends video, installation, and live action to question inherited memory, the invisibility of pain, and the role of women in conflict and silence.

Her long-term performance projects include ZERO LINE, THE VYSHYVANKA, and The Last 4 Days of February: Diary, which was shown in multiple venues and festivals in France, Germany, Finland, and Greece. In 2024, her performance EULOGY was presented at the Heidelberg Workshop on Human Rights Education, and she spoke at the Human Rights in the Balance conference at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.

She has been an artist-in-residence at institutions such as SomoS (Berlin), HIAP (Finland), Gallery Huit (France), and L’AiR Arts (Paris), and collaborated on the transnational documentary film project The Loom. Her artistic language is deeply rooted in embodied research, combining legal-political awareness with ritual, intimacy, and resistance.

Currently based in Berlin, Semenkova continues to develop the performance project INSIDE, a site-responsive work dedicated to intergenerational female trauma, historical memory, and the ethics of witnessing.