Maria Zaharieva is an artist and iconographer born in Sliven, Bulgaria, in 1971. Her interest in art began at an early age and developed further once she started taking art classes at the local children's centre. As her skills grew, she entered competitions and, in 1979, was the only representative from her hometown at the International Children's Art Festival, hosted in Sofia.

In 1985, Maria was accepted to the National Art School "Dimitar Dobrovich" in Sliven, one of only three art schools in the country at the time. For the next five years, she studied painting, graphics, applied textiles, typography, and art history.

After graduating, she worked as a designer at a textile factory until 1993, when she was accepted into the first cohort of a newly offered Iconography course at the "St. Cyril and St. Methodius" University of Veliko Tarnovo. There she studied iconography, theology, fresco and mural painting, graphic techniques, decoration, and the history of art and religion, graduating with a master's degree in Iconography in 1998.

Since then, Maria has been writing icons, though she experienced a brief break after relocating to London. She resumed her work a few years later, and is now an active iconographer, her work is regularly published in the British Association of Iconographers review, and has participated in exhibitions at the Westminster Abbey, as well as Bosnia & Herzegovina.