Martínez-Cañas was born in 1960 in Cuba, but her family moved to Miami when she was three months old, then Puerto Rico around the age of four. She graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography in 1982 and earned a Master of Fine Arts in the same subject from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago two years later. She received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship in 1985 to photograph and do research in Spain, relating to the discovery of Cuba by Christopher Columbus.Congdon & Kelley, p. 165
