Maria Penzlien (Born 1949, Wurzburg, Germany) started taking photos while she was training as a photo lab assistant after completing her primary education. Later she became a certified nurse, worked in different hospitals, moved to Hamburg in 1970, where she met her husband and started a family and had six children. After studying in the mid-1990s, she became self-employed in an advisory capacity but spent her free time intensively studying photography. On business-related and private journeys between 2004 and 2016, she produced portraits, landscapes, and cityscapes. For about 5 years, she focused on stills and presented large-format albums with flowers, plants, shells and bird feathers. From the spring of 2017 until the end of 2018, she devoted herself to the subject of "trees", and recently she finished a series in which she extensively studied the qualities of light.