Maria Figueira has a Bachelor degree in Anthropology from the University of Coimbra (2017), with a semester mobility under the Erasmus+ exchange program in the Københavns Universitet (Denmark). In 2017 she was awarded an academic merit award, the 3% Best Students Award by the University of Coimbra. She has training in Documentary and Museology (2019) and a Master degree in Anthropology - Visual Cultures by NOVA University Lisbon (2023). She did an internship in Museu de Lisboa, later working as a collaborator for an exhibition in that museum and authoring a text for its catalogue. She has worked with image recording and editing for different mediums in several contexts. In 2021 she won first place in a FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) fellowship contest in a research project. Since then, she has been working as a scholarship holder for the mentioned project, TRANSMAT (IHC - UÉ/IN2PAST) - Transnational Materialities (1850-1930): reconstituting collections and connecting histories (PTDC/FER-HFC/2793/2020), at the Santos Rocha Municipal Museum in Figueira da Foz where she studies the history of a colonial collection that entered the museum in the end of the XIX century. She has help organized and participated in several workshops, conferences and scientific meetings in Portugal and Spain sharing research results, been invited for lectures to university and community audiences and given guided tours in the mentioned museum. Currently, she is working on the publication of two articles, one of which as co-author, in the international magazine "História, Ciência, Saúde-Manguinhos" to be published in a special issue in 2025, and at least a third one about research results and methodologies. She is also participating in the creation of an exhibition in the Santos Rocha Municipal Museum that will showcase research results on the history of the collection studied in the museum and include the rehabilitation of the ethnography room in its permanent exhibition. She is a PhD candidate in the program "History and Philosophy of Science, minor in Museology" at the University of Évora (Institute of Contemporary History - IN2PAST). In her PhD research, she analyses the connections between Portuguese colonial history and the history of ethnographic collections in museums in the center region of Portugal.