Myra Landau (Bucharest, Romania, 1926 - Alkmaar, The Netherlands, 2018) was a self-taught artist and art researcher. The Landau family fled Romania in April of 1940, fearing persecution from fascist forces. In November of 1940, the family finally arrived in Rio de Janeiro, when Myra was 13 years of age. In Brazil, Landau met artists Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Wesley Duke Lee, João Câmara, Sérgio Camargo, Antônio Dias and others who motivated her to paint. At first working in a figurative style, she eventually turned to abstraction, developing a style of her own.

In the 1960s, Landau discovered a new metal engraving technique called metal relief. She also honed her own painting style by applying pastel directly on raw linen, and was the first Latin American abstract woman artist to use movements of free geometrical lines, which as of 1965 she called Rhythms. While living in Mexico City, Landau was part of the Salón Independiente, an activist group of art professionals who protested the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre orchestrated by the Mexican government. Political activism remained important to Landau throughout her life. In 1974, she moved to Jalapa, Veracruz to become a professor at the Faculty of Visual Arts at the Universidad Veracruzana and, in 1975 she was promoted as a full-time researcher for the Institute of Aesthetics and Artistic Creation. In 1994 she followed her family to Italy, moving to Israel in 2010 and finally to The Netherlands in 2016. All those years she never stopped painting and drawing. She also wrote assiduously, producing numerous artist books.

Landau had more than sixty individual exhibitions during her lifetime. The most important were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, in 1974 and 1987, respectively. She also participated in at least 150 group exhibitions in Mexico, France, Italy, Brazil, Chile, Spain, the United States and Cuba. She passed away on July 14, 2018.