About
Internationally recognized visionary:
Maria Lorena Lehman is an award-winning visionary artist and foresight architect – working as a creative strategist who blends speculative design, philosophy, and worldbuilding to anticipate and shape future possibilities. By combining design thinking, systems thinking, and a deep understanding of the interconnectedness between humanity, technology, and the environment, Lehman explores emerging trends, technologies, and societal shifts to design immersive, thought-provoking scenarios that challenge assumptions and inspire impactful decisions. Her work helps organizations and individuals to navigate uncertainty in ways that leverage new possibility, fostering collaboration and critical thinking so today's design choices beneficially shape near and far tomorrows. Focused on creating meaningful, innovative, and flourishing futures, Lehman’s expertise in worldbuilding and foresight methodologies positions her as a transformative leader in future-focused design and strategy.
A pioneering studio practice:
Within her creative practice, Maria Lorena Lehman focuses on links between architectural design, scientific discovery, emerging technology, and human potential. She uses research-driven digital media, filmmaking, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, and writing to push architectural design in ways that imagine new futures for our world. Lehman is described as “one of the leading experts on delivering exceptional occupant experience through smart building design”, and she is author of the internationally published award-winning book entitled, Adaptive Sensory Environments. Maria Lorena Lehman is also recipient of the Harvard University Digital Design Prize for the “most creative use of digital media in relation to the design professions”, and her projects have been described as "diving into the heart" of environmental design.
Lehman holds the degrees of Master in Design with Distinction from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Architecture with Honors from Virginia Tech. She has served as Instructor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), and currently serves as Mentor to postgraduate students at the Harvard GSD. Maria Lorena Lehman is widely published in a multitude of books, research journals, and is in numerous periodicals including Architect Magazine, The Architect's Journal, Rethinking the Future, ArchDaily, and Forbes.
Consistently at the core of her work is a motivation to push the role of environments into more proactive symphonic realms that empower people to thrive and achieve fulfillment at their highest potential. Maria Lorena Lehman is founder of MLL ATELIER, a multi award-winning studio based in the United States that was named Boutique Design Firm of the Year for North America. Additionally, Lehman is recipient of the Harmony for Humanity: Global Consciousness Art Prize, as well as the International Leonardo da Vinci Prize. Her works are shown in galleries, art fairs, and museums internationally, including New York, Barcelona, Miami, London, and Paris.
Leading a new mission for humanity:
As Maria Lorena Lehman forges new paths for harmonic environments, she aims to help create a world where all thrive. This is why her creations are said to be "evocative visual poetry of motion that is a new inspiration". Currently, her studio work looks for new ways environments can uplift quality of life by innovating experience, which she explores deeply through her creative process. At the heart of her work is a motivation to push the role of environments into more proactive realms that empower people to thrive and achieve fulfillment at their highest potential. Maria Lorena Lehman has a vision for how interdisciplinary findings between architecture, science, philosophy, and emerging technology can unlock more nurturing environmental futures that she envisions as new architectural possibilities through her studio-works that inspire, amaze, and delight in ways not experienced before.
STATEMENT OF PRACTICE
A WORLD OF JOYThe call is upon us to not only solve for global problems, but to also solve for global possibility. While the latter is important to consider, it is the former that primarily drives my creative practice. I believe that when we reach for what we can become, we see better ways to solve for what we have not yet been.
I see a future for our world where symphonic environments holistically nurture humanity to bring the best out in our nature as we actualize our highest potential. To build this vision, I create film, sound, and art that use imagination to push design horizons. I also use design to push into new cinematic, symphonic, and artistic frontiers.
Within my architectural art and design compositions, I present worlds that make the seemingly impossible, possible. This helps us rethink, appreciate, evolve, and nurture how we cultivate our own world – including our innermost being, as well as our external reality.
Buckminster Fuller once stated, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”.
Through my studio practice, I am building new models of poetic beauty with vision, creativity, and compassion. Ultimately, my mission is to cultivate a world of joy. By seeing beauty not only when it is easy, but also when it is difficult, life becomes richer because the feelings of curiosity, aliveness, and love win.
