After obtaining her High School Diploma in Humanities and Arts, she graduated in Modern Italian Literature and she currently teaches Italian literature.
Studying history of art, she broadened her humanistic knowledge and triggered her desire to actively approach the field of painting.
Her works reveal the desire to give expressive strength to images, often overcoming form or filtering it to leave of it just its faded allusion.
Her main subjects are landscapes: the protagonist is sometimes a metropolis flooded with the orange nuances of a sunset or soaked in the leaden light of winter evenings; other times, houses and skyscrapers crowd in a feast of shades of red, gray and brilliant light blue, or, occasionally, houses seem to faintly emerge among the burnished and scorched colors of the desert. Another recurrent theme is the study of open spaces, not colonized by man yet: foliage blackened by the unforgiving strength of flames, twisted or threatening plants or, by contrast, golden and copper trees, as precious as jewels.
Contrasts that generate a range of intentionally differentiated pictorial approaches, striving to grasp the fluctuating and endless multiplicity of reality.
Always maintaining a strong personal connotation, paintings range from informal to figurative style.
The latter is reviewed with mixed techniques, always conveying a creative interplay of matter achieved by applying materials ranging from cement to resin, golden foil and different metals.
The artist paints on various materials, like wooden boards (fir, O.M.B.) MDF. canvas.

…they say about her:

…the true voice of nature...(…) is for Maria Teresa Pagan a source of inspiration …and it feeds her "palette" of a subtly elegant lyricism… Her works beam a special energy producing the Surrealist orbit in the space-time dimension for a fully vertical perspective, mostly through her -very personal- way to apply paint, with elegant layers, precious touches, thick impasto.
….The coordinates, for a consistent interpretation of her style, are revealed by the inner edge of color, where "expression" enhances the magmatic and stone-like spreading, almost dramatically portraying a state of loss and loneliness, that is sometimes the prerequisite to favor true creativity.
All this can be better perceived through the upsetting structure of the "metropolis" which enhance the malaise and the existential drama; these paintings are opposed to landscapes for the message they convey, reflecting life choices fully balanced with a nature that has lost its sense to us.
Pagan nurtures her works with poetry, atmosphere and deep resonance though silence and deprivation of landscapes to convey a faint rendering of memory: places stemming from dreams emerge on white canvas with coats of blazing color, to materialize, within a Mondrian-like architecture, veritable windows enabling us to cast a glance at infinity.
The gray-light blue perspective planes enhance optic fluctuations obtained with a silver light-color through contrasts and dark shades of browns, ochre and earth colors.
Pagan employs white, symbol of purity, and black, symbol of troubling space and of emptiness, to transcribe the atmospheres of nature, perceived trough the delicacy of her sensitivity and subjective view. It is a process poising echoes referring to the history of the Twentieth century in Emilia: Morandi. Mattioli, in particular, adds substance…

Except from the presentation edited by Dino Del Vecchio