Marta Stanya was born on March 4, 1913 in the Valka district of the Yertinskaya municipality of the Livonia province of the Russian Empire (today: Strenchy, Latvia). She grew up in poor circumstances, but nevertheless it did not stop her from pursuing her interest in art. Stanya graduated in 1932 and worked as a teacher in various cities. From 1936 to 1945 she studied architecture at the University of Latvia and at the same time she worked as a building inspector in the shipping department until 1942 to finance her studies. As a student, she participated in a workshop on the Functionalism style. She received her diploma in architecture at the age of 32 for her project of the concert hall in the Riga Citadel with a total of 900 seats.

Ernest Stalberg (Latvian architect, 1883-1958), the leading professor of the workshop on functionalism, made her an offer to continue working with him as an assistant at the University of Latvia, supporting the trend of the style. After the Faculty of Architecture was closed in 1950, during the rule of Stalin, Stanya was active in the Furniture Art Association. For her designed set she received her first award at the First All-Union Furniture Exhibition.
Following the restrained functionalism style, she designed a building with two other architects in 1951-1953 in Riga. It is located on the site of houses that were bombed during the war. The modesty of the facade is intended to recall this periods character.
Following the project, Stanya worked as an architect and construction manager on a cultural house of the fishermen’s collective in Skulte/Zvejniekciems. The building was to serve for cultural events, such as exhibitions or theater performances. Two years later (1955) she began to plan the building of a secondary school in another farming village. The work, like the House of Culture, was to be designed according to Soviet monumental classicism (“Stalin’s Empire”) and thus did not meet her preferences. After the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR issued a resolution “On the elimination of excesses in design and construction”, the architect returned to rational architecture and finished her project of the school building with accents of Scandinavian motifs.
Stanya submitted her sketches and drawings to the 1959 competition for the new construction project of the Dailes Theater (Dailes Teātra) in Riga, which she won. After the completion in 1976, it subsequently became the largest protected cultural monument in the Latvian SSR.

On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Daile Theater, the life works of Marta Stanya, who left her mark on Latvian architecture, were documented in a special exhibition. Pictures and video of the exhibition in 2010: https://www.behance.net/gallery/2134928/Behind-The-Curtain-Architect-Marta-Stana
A visual view (language: Latvian) of the facade and the inner details of the Zvejniekciems Culture House is illustrated in the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg1A4dUtxJo