Marina Abramović. Director, actor, set designer and scenography (Maria Callas)

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, she has pioneered performance art, creating some of the form’s most important early works. Exploring herphysical and mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2010, she had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in The Artist is Present at the Museumof Modern Art in New York. She founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields. Her most recent publication is Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (Crown Archetype, 2016). Her retrospective The Cleaner opened at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2017 and has toured to seven other European venues, ending at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade in 2019. In September 2020 the Bayerische Staatsoper presented the world premiere of 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which will continue to tour to other venues. In 2023 she presents a solo exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, the first female artist in the institution’s 250-year history to occupy the entire gallery space with her work. 7 Deaths of Maria Callas will be her ENO debut.