Performance artist, Marina Abramović, was born in Belgrade, Serbia, on November 30th, 1946 and is currently based in New York City. With an impressive career that spans three decades, Abramović has been described as "the grandmother of performance art" for her pioneering contributions to the artform, including her encouragement of observer participation in performances. From 1965-1970 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and in 1972 went on to complete her post-graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia.She began executing her first solo shows during her time as a tutor at the Academy of Fine Arts at Novi Sad, Serbia, between 1973-1975. She met her future collaborator, the West German performance artist, Ulay, when she moved to Amsterdam in 1976 and they spent the next decade plus together exploring the concepts of artistic identities vs ego. In 1988 they conceptualized the performance, The Great Wall Walk, wherein each walked 2500 km (Abramović from the Yellow Sea and Ulay from the Gobi Desert) meeting at China's Great Wall in the middle in order to end their tumultuous collaborative relationship. Notably, it took eight years to secure the permits from the Chinese Government for the work.Among Abramović's most recent, noteworthy performances is the 2005 Seven Easy Pieces performed at the Gugenheim Museum in NYC during which she arduously recreated (for seven hours during seven consecutive nights) the works of five artists from the 1960's and 1970's, a re-performance of her Lips of Thomas as well as introduced a new performance on the last of the seven nights.In 2010, New York's MoMA held a major retrospective of her work (the biggest performance art exhibition in MoMA's history) during which she performed the 736-hour and 30-minute, The Artist is Present, during which she sat static and in silence while spectators took turns sitting opposite of her. This attracted many famous faces in the audience, such as Lady Gaga, as well as Abramović's former collaborator, Ulay.