Maria Popova
| Maria Popova | |
|---|---|
| Born |
28 July 1984 Bulgaria |
| Residence | Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Nationality | Bulgarian |
| Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | Writer, blogger, and critic |
| Website | www |
Maria Popova (Bulgarian: Мария Попова; born 28 July 1984) is a Bulgarian writer, blogger, and critic living in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for her blog BrainPickings.org, which features her writing on culture, books, and eclectic subjects off and on the Internet.
Popova's parents are ethnic Bulgarians who met in Russia when they were both foreign exchange students in the early 1980s. Popova was born in Bulgaria in 1984. Her mother studied library science, while her father studied engineering and eventually became an Apple salesman. During Popova's childhood, one of her grandmothers often read to her from a collection of encyclopedias. Because of her influence, Popova was exposed to a vast amount of knowledge at a young age, which fueled her curiosity about the world. Popova first worked when she was 8 years old, making martenitsas having set up a lemonade stand-esque shop on the street to sell them.
Popova graduated from the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria in 2003. She attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a degree in Communications, though her grandmother wanted her to get an MBA. Popova paid for her tuition by working four part-time jobs on top of a full college course load: as an advertising representative for The Daily Pennsylvanian, as an intern for a local writer, as an employee for a work-study job at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and as a staff member for a small start-up advertising agency in Philadelphia.
In 2005, while Popova worked at an advertising agency, she noticed that her co-workers were circulating information within the advertising industry around the office for inspiration. However, Popova thought creativity was better sparked with exposure to information outside of the industry one was familiar with. In an effort to stir creativity, she regularly sent emails to the entire office containing five things that had nothing to do with advertising, but were meaningful, interesting, or important. Because of the popularity of the emails, Popova felt that there was an "intellectual hunger for that sort of cross-disciplinary curiosity and self-directed learning."
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