Maria Papanikolaou is a visual artist and postdoctoral fellow at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA). She studied law at the University of Athens (IKY, 2000) and sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands as a Huygens Scholarship Program scholar (2008). In 2011, she graduated from the Postgraduate Program in Fine Arts (ASFA) and, in 2022, she supported her PhD thesis at the same school with a scholarship from the Onassis Foundation (2012-2016), the Foundation for Education and European Culture (2013-2017), the A. G. Leventis Foundation (2015) and the Fulbright Foundation (2016-2017).

The exhibition Free from what (annexM, 2023) is her first solo exhibition in Greece. She has held solo shows in the Netherlands, at Expodium (Utrecht, 2007) and Filmhuis den Haag (The Hague, 2008). She has also participated in group exhibitions, including: Still Here Tomorrow, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre (2019), Athens Adhocracy, Onassis Cultural Centre (2015), Expanded Senses, Museum of Applied Arts, Frankfurt (2015), Afresh: A New Generation of Greek Artists (EMST, 2013), Art ID at KunstVLAAI (Amsterdam, 2008). In 2015, she received the Open Call Prize at the Frankfurt Biennale of the Moving Image, Frankfurt.

She teaches at ASFA and the University of Thessaly and since 2023 she is Fulbright Greece Outreach Ambassador in the field of visual arts.