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]