Marina Gross-Hoy, PhD, is a writer, speaker, and Museum Studies scholar. She takes playing in museums very seriously.

Marina’s work invites people to cultivate new relationships with the experience of being alive. Her speaking engagements, participatory workshops, and literary essays offer spaces to experiment with other ways of inhabiting and understanding lived experience. Marina is the founder of the Laboratoire d’attentions, a research-creation initiative focused on designing artistic interventions informed by embodied attention, contemplative practices, sensory interpretation, and trauma-informed approaches. She has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University, and the Collegeville Institute.

Her newsletter, The Museum Gaze, explores how observing ordinary life with the same embodied attention used in museums can foster wonder, compassion, and agency.

Originally from Michigan, Marina moved to museum-saturated Paris for a master's in muséologie at the École du Louvre. She later joined the education team at the Agence France-Muséums, the French agency that supported the creation of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Québec became her adopted home when she came to pursue a PhD in Museum Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Marina’s doctoral research analyzed the cross-sectoral collaborations that occur when museum teams work with technology companies to develop digital projects that facilitate experiences for visitors.

Her research interests are situated at the intersection of well-being, care, narrative, experience, imagination, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is an associate member of the Group for Research on Education and Museums (GREM) at UQAM. She has also served on the board of the Committee for Education and Cultural Action within the International Council of Museums (ICOM)—and the board of her local forest.

Marina is represented by Hannah Strouth at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates.

I would like to acknowledge that the land on which I live and work is the traditional and unceded territory of the Abenaki people and the Wabenaki confederacy.