Marina’s writing explores what looking at artwork can teach us about seeing the art of our ordinary lives.

The Museum Gaze (2021 - present), a Substack newsletter that explores how looking at life with the same embodied gaze we use with art in a museum can open us up to wonder, compassion, and empowerment

Selected essays:

Series:

Art for the Wilderness (2022), a seven-week series that looked at what we can learn about navigating periods of wilderness from artists who engage with difficult experiences through their art
Artful Advent (2021), a four-week series to help parents of little children to nourish themselves in a busy season by looking at their lives like art

Online

“Our Lady of the Thaw” (2024), KHÔRA, Issue 40

“Sensuality of the Freeze” (2024), KHÔRA, Issue 39

“A Bridge is a Place” (2024), KHÔRA, Issue 38

“Stranger Technologies” (2024), KHÔRA, Issue 37

“Sister” (2023), KHÔRA, Issue 26

“Shadow Revelations” (2023), Mothering Spirit

“Terrible News and Beautiful Fruit” (2022), Anthrow Circus

“Illumination in the Detroit Institute of Arts” (2017), Culture Keeper

“Retreating in The Met” (2016), Culture Keeper

“Fostering Imagination in Museums” (2016), Culture Keeper

IMAGINIBUS (started in 2014), a blog with over 200 articles about playing with new ways of experiencing art museums

Print

“Untamed Attention” (2025), Entwined: An Anthology of Creativity & Motherhood

“Nocturne” & “Nebulizer” (2024), Connections in a Flash: An Anthology of Flash Writing and Poetry

“Annunciation” (2022), Episcopal Charities Lenten Reader

Honors and residencies

Invited writing workshop, Reading and Writing with Joan Didion (a workshop with Alissa Wilkinson), Collegeville Institute, held in Durham, North Carolina (2026)

Longlisted for the The New Quarterly’s 2025 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest (2025)

Honorable Mention in the 2025 Plentitudes Prizes in Nonfiction, guest judged by Melody Nixon (2025)

Curated writer at KHÔRA (Issues 37-40), commissioned to write four essays as part of the ninth curated team of writers, with editor Leigh Hopkins (2024)

Invited writing workshop, Exploring Identity and (Dis)belonging through the Personal Essay with Enuma Okoro, Collegeville Institute, held at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan (2023)

Doctoral residency at the École du Louvre’s Research Center in Paris, with funding from the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University and the Groupe de recherche sur l’éducation et les musées at the Université du Québec à Montréal (2023)

Featured for “Making Art, Even Here” in the Substack Reads list of favorite Substack articles of the year: “Substack Reads: George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Nellie Bowles, and more select their top reads” (2023)

How people describe Marina’s writing

“Engaging, full, and juicy”

“Insightful, hopeful, clear-eyed, empowering”

“Full of surprises. Luscious.”

“Like a warm hug”

About Marina

Marina Gross-Hoy, PhD, (she/her) is a writer, speaker, facilitator, and Museum Studies scholar. Her work invites people to cultivate new relationships with the experience of being alive.

Marina writes about playing with new ways of paying attention to lived experience. Her newsletter, The Museum Gaze, explores how observing ordinary life with the same careful attention used in museums can foster wonder, compassion, and agency. She 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.

Originally from Michigan, Marina moved to museum-saturated Paris to complete a master's in muséologie at the École du Louvre and work on the education team at the Agence France-Muséums. Québec became her adopted home when she came to pursue a PhD in Museum Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She is an associate member of the Group for Research on Education and Museums (GREM) at UQAM and has served on the board of the Committee for Education and Cultural Action within the International Council of Museums (ICOM).