Marina Amaral

A self-taught artist, she was an international relations student in college,[2] but dropped out in April 2015 to pursue art full-time.[3][4]

Amaral's creative process involves adding color to black and white photographs using Photoshop, following careful historical research to determine the colors of each object pictured.[1][5] Amaral describes what she does as providing a "second perspective" as the pictures with color convey images that do not seem too far removed from the contemporaneous viewer.[6][7][8] Her process of colorizing a photo can take as little as an hour or more than a month to complete.[9][4][10][11] Each colorized photo may include hundreds of layers.[12]

In 2017, Amaral was the illustrator for historian Dan Jones' book, The Colour of Time: A New History of the World, 1850–1960.[13][14]

In 2018 Amaral colorized twenty archival photos of Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners, under the project title Faces of Auschwitz.[15][16][17] The project was a collaboration with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.[18]

In 2020, Amaral was revealed to be on the autism spectrum.[19]