Maria Yoon

Maria Yoon (born 1971 ), also known as Maria the Korean Bride, is a Korean-born American performance artist and filmmaker. Based in New York City, she is best known for her extended performance art project and film where in the course of nine years, she gets married in all fifty U.S. states, as well as Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Yoon's family immigrated to the US when she was seven. She grew up in Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, New York,

Career Early work Yoon felt an inordinate pressure from her parents and the Korean American community to marry after turning 30. Yoon, however, felt the project reinforced stereotypical male roles She started by marrying two people in Las Vegas on a friend's vacation trip. In Detroit, she married an artist dressed as Death. When she experienced racism in Wisconsin, she married a shirt representing the company where she experienced the incident. Her final wedding was held in Times Square in New York City, officiated by Jimmy McMillan, of the Rent is Too Damn High party. Yoon selected her husband from a raffle.

Screenings The film version has been screened at ATA Gallery in San Francisco, MTS Gallery in Anchorage, the Manifest in Honolulu, UT Austin, Stony Brook University, and various film festivals like the FEM Cine of Santiago, Chile and in Atlanta, Sarasota, Florida The 2013 New York City premiere, held at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center, sold out.

Responses to the work In Montana, the minister, a recent newlywed, said "She’s asking some really good questions about the institution." In New Hampshire Yoon got lectured by a minister on the project and there have been people who have bowed out of the project because of her support of gay marriage.

Ghost weddings After learning about police in northwest China charging a man with murdering two women with mental disabilities, alleging that he wanted to sell their corpses to be used in so-called "ghost weddings" on BBC.com, Yoon took an interest in incorporating the old practice of marrying the dead into her work. In July 2017, after a local Taoist priest had an omen that marrying a deceased man would be unlucky, Yoon married an imaginary husband at a Taoist temple in the Xizhi District of New Taipei City, Taiwan. She wore a pink hanbok with her wrist tied with a red string to a memorial tablet representing the fake individual. Still, many Taiwanese avoided attending the filming of the performance out of superstition, and the priest ritually cleansed the film crew with incense.

Other work and exhibitions She did a one-woman show at the Collective Unconscious in downtown Manhattan in 2007 She was included in the show "Me Love You Long Time" that travelled from Newark's Aljira Center for Contemporary Art to Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts in 2013.

Yoon is also a master storyteller who has presented at the American Museum of Natural History, Newark Museum, and the Korea Society. Currently she teaches and lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.

Collections Smith College, Scripps College, Otis College of Art and Design, Museum of Modern Art, Temple University, Wellesley College's Book Art Collection, Haverford College, University of Melbourne Library, and private collections.

Awards and recognition Pollock-Krasner Foundation Abrons Art Center artists residency, 1999-2000 Manhattan Community Arts Fund, LMCC Franklin Furnace Fund 2008-09 New York State Council on the Arts, 2009 Director's Award, Atlanta Korean Film Festival, 2013 Named by HuffPost one of "10 Documentaries About Artists in Love You Need to Watch," 2014

Filmography and TV appearances Maria the Korean Bride: The Voice of Asian American Women, 2013 Cake Boss, TLC, Season 4, Episode 28, "A Funny Regis and Fifty Weddings" KBS Documentary Age: The story of a woman who has 50 weddings (KBS 다큐시대 – 50번의 결혼식을 올린 여자의 이야기), 2011