Maria Vitória is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University. She graduated in Literary Studies at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in 2018 with the undergraduate thesis "​Literatura de Cordel and the Absence of popular culture in the Teaching of Brazilian Literature". At the same institution, Grisi got her master's working with Brazilian literature and acting mainly with Northeastern popular poetry and national identity. In 2023, she defended her second M.A. intitled "Experiências geográficas, relações humanas: o construto do folheto nordestino a partir do fenômeno sociogeográfico das secas". She is currently working to obtain a Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Science Technology and plans to apply mapping technologies to her dissertation.

At The Ohio State University, she has taken courses in Translation and Interpretation and participated in the Bread Loaf Translator's Conference (2024). She is currently translating "O Romance do Pavão Misterioso," a folheto de cordel by José Camelo de Melo Rezende, into English. Additionally, she serves as the Assistant Editor for WordWise, the newsletter of the Translation and Interpretation program at The Ohio State University.

In 2024, she received several prestigious awards, including the Bread Loaf Translator's Conference scholarship, the International Research and Scholar Grant, the Luso-American Development Foundation Research Grant for research at Portugal's National Library, the Center for Languages, Literatures & Cultures Graduate Research Grant, and the Felice M. Grad Scholarship.