Marina Abramovic is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist currently based in the United States who is known for her work exploring body art, endurance art, feminist art, and the relationship between the performer and audience. She has pioneered a new notion of identity emphasizing the participation of observers by focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". Her work has often courted controversy not only for containing nudity, but also for their perilousness as they occasionally featured bloodshed and otherwise posed threat to herself. In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute, a non-profit foundation for performance art that operates as a traveling organization. In the recent decades, she has collaborated with several high-profile celebrities like Jay Z, Lady Gaga, and James Franco and has directed the segment, Balkan Erotic Epic, in the British-American anthology film Destricted (2006).
