Marina Abramovic, born November 30, 1946, is one of the most well-known performance artists of the contemporary era. Abramovic was born in Belgrade, formerly Yugoslavia, to parents closely tied to the repressive Communist regime. Her dramatic, at times dangerous, performance pieces seem to be responses to her sometimes violent childhood.

Although Abramovic’s mother was difficult, she supported her daughter’s pursuit of art. From 1965-1970, Abramovic studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, then from 1970-72 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In the early 1970s, she began creating performative art pieces, working increasingly and quickly to pieces that involved her body.

Her early works used her body as both the medium and the subject. In Rhythm 10, she stabbed the spaces in between her fingers, drawing blood in some cases. In Rhythm 0, she stood in a room with 72 objects, from a loaded gun to a rose, for 6 hours and invited the audience to use the objects how they wanted to on her. All of these early pieces took place before the strict 10 PM curfew her mother had set for her.

In 1975, Marina Abramovic visited and then moved to Amsterdam. Here, she met German-born artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, and she moved out of her parents’ house for the first time to live with him. For the next 12 years the two were lovers and collaborators. Their works focused on duality: the divisions between mind and body, pain and pleasure, nature and nurture, and male and female.

The couple performed their works in galleries across Europe. They did not back down from the intensity of Abramovic’s early performances. In Breathing In, Breathing Out, they breathed into one another’s mouths nearly to the point of suffocation. In 1988 when they decided to end their relationship, their final piece The Lovers was a three month walk from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China. They met in the middle, said goodbye, and have had little contact since.

Marina Abramovic also began creating sculptures that invited audience interaction.

Through the 1990s, she taught at art schools across Europe and began receiving awards and accolades for her work. She did not capture her performances on video, feeling it would not be able to repeat the performance, however she began to re-produce some of her early works.

In 2010, MoMA in New York City held a major retrospective of Abramovic’s works, featuring a new performance The Artist is Present. For the entirety of the exhibition, she sat across from an empty chair and invited visitors to sit opposite her. This piece attracted long lines of visitors and increased her fame and recognition. During the exhibition, a company of performers recreated her works, from the violence she used to standing nude in a doorway blocking entry into rooms.

Marina Abramovic is now in her mid-70s and continues to create new works.

She calls herself the “grandmother of performance art”. In 2012, she opened the Marina Abramovic Institute for Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson New York.

This institution supports teaching, funding, and preservation of performance art, ensuring a legacy for the ephemeral art form.