Born and raised on Long Island(NY). In 2006, Marissa graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz with Honors in: Anthropology B.A., History of Art and Visual Culture B.A., she also had the opprtunity to study these subjects at Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands. After completing university, she decided to travel in order to understand how the arts and culture she studied might be applied to living human settlements. The approach to travel which she took was more of a field study, each new place served as an integral part of the experiment in learning.