Portal:Visual arts/Selected biography/15

Maria Dulębianka (21 October 1861 – 7 March 1919) was a Polish artist and activist. Born into a family of landed gentry, she attended finishing school in Kraków and then studied art in Warsaw and in Vienna and Paris. Her work was recognized in the 1900 Paris Exposition and her Studium dziewczyny (Girls' Studio) was purchased by the National Museum in Kraków. After 1889, the majority of her paintings were of her companion Maria Konopnicka.

Dulębianka was active in the women's movement pressing for women to be admitted to the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts and for the establishment of a gymnasium in Lviv for girls to gain access to higher education. She published articles and gave lectures on women's issues. Active in the fight for women's suffrage, she ran as a candidate in the 1908 election for the Parliament of Galicia, but was rejected because she was a woman. Undiscouraged, she continued to strive for social equality, Polish independence, and cooperation between Poles and Ukrainians.

Dulębianka founded the Women's Electoral Committee to press for women's inclusion in the Lviv City Council, the Union of Women's Rights, the Men's League for the Defense of Women's Rights and the Women's Civic Work Committee. As the leader of the Civic Work Committee, she established kitchens for the poor, children's nurseries, and a club to care for street children and orphans. Under the occupation of Lviv by the Imperial Russian Army and during the Polish–Ukrainian War, she organized humanitarian aid. She contracted typhus while assisting prisoners of war and died in 1919. Dulębianka is remembered as a pioneer of women's rights in Poland.