Maria Theresa Barbist is an interdisciplinary artist based in Miami, Florida, working across painting, sculpture, performance, and video. Born and raised in Tyrol, Austria, she trained first as a clinical psychologist and psychodrama therapist at the University of Innsbruck before earning her MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. That clinical background remains the structural foundation of her practice, not a biographical footnote to it.

Barbist’s work was included in the 2026 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art, where she showed Der Grund auf dem ich stehe (The Ground I Stand On), a series of large-scale paintings on tarp incorporating Polaroid transfer, and in Deering Contemporary 2026 at the Deering Estate, Miami. She has received grants from South Arts, Oolite Arts, and Miami-Dade County, and her work is held in the Miami International Airport Collection. She is a studio artist at Bakehouse Art Complex and an adjunct instructor at the University of Miami beginning Fall 2026.