Mária Ferenčuhová studied film screenwriting and dramaturgy and did a postgraduate degree in the history and theory of films at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (VŠMU) in Bratislava, and Sciences du Langage at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences sociales in Paris.
From 2003 to 2013 she worked at the Department of Audiovisual Studies as an assistant professor, from 2004 to 2007 she was the Vice-Rector of the Academy of Performing Arts for International Cooperation, Science and Public Relations, from 2010 to 2012 she was the Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Film and Television of the Academy of Performing Arts, and from 2014 to 2018 she worked as an associate professor with a focus on the theory and history of documentary film.
She has been on the jury of many film festivals, since 2000 she has been the editor of the film-theoretical magazine Kino-Ikon, and she is also a juror and lecturer of a literary competition for young authors called Medziriadky (Between the Lines). Her prose, poetry and artistic translations have been published in the periodicals Fragment, Park, Host, Romboid, Vlna, and many more.
A translator from French, she has translated novels by Michel Houellebecq, Amélie Nothomb, Laurent Binet and Alain Mabanckou, a book of poetry by Nicolas Pesquès, a play by Samuel Beckett and philosophical essays by Paul Virilio, Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière.
Her first collections of poems are Hidden Subtitles (Skryté titulky, 2003), The Principle of Uncertainty (Princíp neistoty 2008), Vain Little Bubbles (Márnivé bublinky, 2010) and Endangered Species (Ohrozený druh, 2012). In the poetry collection Immunity (2019) her literary subject deals with a grave illness and the body becomes a literary canvas, open for dissection, analysis and struggle. The factual style of the writing allows for deep and intimate confrontation. Immunity has won several awards and has been translated into four languages. Black Earth (Černozem) came out in 2020 in Slovakia, and later it was published in Spanish translation. In 2018, Shearsman, an English publishing house, published a selection of her poetry under the title Tidal Events, translated by James Sutherland-Smith.
She lives in Bratislava.
