Born December 1979 in northern Finland

Marja Mikkonen is an artist who uses various forms of media in her work: film, live performance, video, sound, installation, text and photography. Many of her works deal with self-portraiture and memory, personal experiences and thoughts about change. She graduated in 2003 from a performance art course held in Turku Art Academy. Her graduation work was a film entitled “99 Years of My Life”, an experimental study on memory based on the lives of four women, including herself. The film was shown world-widely in international film festivals and won several prizes, including the shared second prize in Cannes Film Festival 2004 in the category of Cinéfondation and the Best Experimental Film in Mediawave (Hungary) 2004. Recently the film was also purchased to the collections of the Modern Art Museum in New York. Mikkonen also has an MFA-degree from the Fine Art Academy of Helsinki, from where she graduated in 2007. Her graduation work to the Academy consisted of another short film, entitled “Rondo”, and a solo exhibition entitled “Madness of the Day”. The exhibition showed several works dealing with loss, death and the formation of identity. Since then she has worked as an art teacher, created site-specific works and performed and worked within a performance group entitled Other Spaces. She is currently writing her first feature film script, planning a documentary film and creating new works for a solo exhibition. Mikkonen lives and works in Helsinki.