Maria Gainza (born December 25, 1975, Buenos Aires) is an Argentine art critic and writer.^[1]

She is a granddaughter of Alberto Gainza Paz, who was director of the newspaper La Prensa.

She began publishing her first articles about art for newspapers and cultural supplements in 2003.She has been a regular contributor to Artforum magazine for more than ten years. She also wrote in the Radar supplement of the newspaper Página/12. She has taught courses for artists at the Center for Artistic Research and art criticism workshops at Torcuato di Tella University.^[2] In 2017, she won the Konex Award in the Visual Arts category.^[3]

She was co-editor of the collection on Argentine art "Los Sentidos", by Adriana Hidalgo Editora.

Optic Nerve (Spanish: El nervio óptico, published in 2014 by Editorial Mansalva), her first foray into narrative, has been translated into ten languages.^[4][5]

In 2018, she published The Black Light (Spanish: La luz negra, published by Editorial Anagrama), a detective novel that deals with the art market and forgery through the lives of four women.^[6]

In 2019 she received Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for "La luz negra".