Marissa Lazaridis is a New York–based visual artist and narrative oil painter raised in Queens, with a background in architecture. Her practice centers on oil painting and extends into drawing and long-form writing, exploring memory, intimacy, impermanence, and the emotional significance of everyday life.

Her relationship with image-making began in childhood, drawing alongside her father as he sketched architectural blueprints. She later studied architecture, developing an attention to space, light, composition, and the ways environments shape human experience. After working professionally in architecture, Lazaridis left the field to pursue her studio practice full-time.

Working from observation, memory, lived experience, and dreams, Lazaridis approaches each painting as a narrative. Ordinary scenes become vessels for something less tangible: the experience of remembering, longing, connection, and the awareness that what is present will inevitably pass.

Writing is an extension of this practice. Lazaridis refers to the interior process that precedes the finished image as “the backstage”: the memories, questions, associations, and emotional impulses from which the work emerges. Through painting and writing, she records what has been felt but could not always be said.