Stysiak works with bodies, materials, and data to trace how experience becomes memory, and how vulnerability takes form.

Marta Stysiak is a visual artist and filmmaker whose practice explores embodied experience, vulnerability, and survival through material processes and technological systems. Working across film, video installation, sculpture, ceramics, printed matter, and data-based forms, she investigates how emotional and somatic states can be translated into material and spatial structures. Her work examines the relationship between body, memory, trauma, and environment, often focusing on forms of intelligence that operate beyond language, metrics, and representation.

Stysiak’s recent research centers on Emotional Clay, an interdisciplinary project combining traditional ceramic practices with biometric sensing, data analysis, and AI-assisted visualisation. Through participatory workshops and installations, she explores clay as a medium of nonverbal communication and survival intelligence—responsive to touch, pressure, rhythm, and repetition. Data collected from body interactions through biometric sensors measuring physiological activity later transformed into graphic forms which she calls Mental landscapes.

Born in Poland, Stysiak graduated from the National Film School in Łódź (MA) and works internationally. Her work has been exhibited at institutions and exhibitions including the National Gallery Mala Stanica in Skopje, Survival Art Review (Wrocław), Cromwell Place (London). She was an artist-in-residence at the Birth Rites Collection, The department of Midvifery, the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery, and Palliative Care at King’s College London, where her video installation BADLAND entered the permanent collection and was later expanded into the feature-length documentary Come Home, co-produced with the support of Arts Council England.

Stysiak is a recipient of the Young Polish Contemporary Art Award Tide, the Credit Suisse Art Award, and a Ministry of Culture and Science Film Scholarship. Her work has been featured in international publications and film festivals, including the Kraków Film Festival, where she was the cinematographer of the award-winning documentary in 2023 and nominated for the Orły 2024 Polish Film Awards. She is a member of the Polish Filmmakers Association and the Female Directors of Photography Collective. 2025 – 2026 holder of the EU-funded National Recovery and Resilience Plan scholarship.