Marissa Molina

Marissa Molina first came to Thrive Collective as a graduate student to volunteer on “Coney Island’s Resilience” mural for the first anniversary of Hurricane Sandy in 2013. After “Resilience,” Thrive Collective transformed its collaborative school murals projects into classroom experiences in 2014. We hired Marissa as one of our first teaching artists the following school year, and she’s never looked back. Marissa holds a BA in Departmental Art Honors and World History from University at Albany, SUNY (2010) along with her MFA in Studio Art from The City College of New York, CUNY (2014). In her spare time, she also teaches martial arts and coaches soccer.

Artistically, Marissa’s specialty is interactive, interdisciplinary installations that amplify people’s personalities with objects in garishly vibrant worlds. Her fascination with humanity’s tumultuous relationship with possessions stems from growing up with a father who rose out of extreme poverty in El Salvador and worked in various positions in the sanitation field after immigrating to the New York. Nurtured by Marissa’s extensive traveling and volunteer experiences abroad, social interactions, and multicultural interests, her works explore the convergence of objects and identity and the disposability of different parts of our lives.