Maria Niro is a New York City-based artist and award-winning filmmaker whose work has been broadcasted on television and screened in theatres, festivals, and museums worldwide. She is a member of New Day Films, a filmmaker-run distribution company providing social issue documentaries to educators founded by American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist Julia Reichert in 1971.

She serves on the advisory board of More Art, a nonprofit organization that supports collaborations between professional artists and communities to create public art and educational programs that inspire social justice.

As the National Gallery of Art put it for the East Coast Premiere of The Art of Un-War:

“Internationally renowned artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has dedicated his work and life to denouncing militarization and war. Maria Niro’s recent documentary The Art of Un-War follows Wodiczko’s trajectory from his birth in Warsaw during World War II, to his expulsion from Poland by the communist regime, to today. Combining sculptural elements and technology, Wodiczko’s projects often function as interventions in public spaces, disrupting the valorization of state-sanctioned aggression. Since the 1980s, his deft, site-specific projections of images onto the facades of office and government buildings have grown to incorporate recordings of personal stories told by war veterans, refugees, and immigrants, projected directly onto war memorials, often animating the busts of revered historic leaders. Niro documents many of his major works, including The Homeless Vehicle Project (1988–1989), created in collaboration with homeless communities in Montreal, Philadelphia, and New York City; The Hiroshima Projection (1999), projected onto the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, Japan; and the as-yet-unrealized project of transforming Paris’ monument to war, the Arc de Triomphe, into a temporary site for peace activism.”