Biography
Maria Lorena Lehman is an award-winning Spatial Futurist, creating design visions for pioneering organizations, cultures, and missions. Through new media art, these visions shape future worlds by innovating architectural technology in ways that fuse science-fiction thinking with visionary design-science.
Lehman is founder of MLL ATELIER® concept art and design studio — winning a multitude of awards:
- For design, these awards include the THA Boutique Design Firm of the Year Award for North America in Innovation & Design, as well as the Harvard University Digital Design Prize for the "most creative use of digital media in relation to the design professions".
- For art, these awards include the Harmony for Humanity: Global Consciousness Art Prize, as well as the International Leonardo da Vinci Prize.
- For research, these awards include the Silver Medal Nautilus Book Award for her seminal book entitled Adaptive Sensory Environments published by Routledge.
By combining speculative design, systems thinking, and a deep understanding of the interconnectedness between humanity, technology, and the environment, Maria Lorena Lehman explores emerging trends, technologies, and societal shifts to create immersive, thought-provoking scenarios that challenge assumptions and inspire new possibilities for the future. Her design, art, and research helps innovative organizations and pioneering leaders to forge into the unknown 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 aesthetic futures, Lehman’s expertise and design artistry in worldbuilding and foresight methodologies positions her as a transformative changemaker for future-focused advancement.
Maria Lorena Lehman is a graduate of Harvard University holding a Master in Design with Distinction specializing in Digital Media and Production Environments, as well as holding the Bachelor of Architecture with Honors from Virginia Tech. Currently, Lehman serves as Advisor to architectural scholars, practitioners, and leaders through her online platform which, since its inception, has served over 1 million users globally. 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. Her work is shown in galleries, art fairs, conferences, and museums internationally, including New York, Barcelona, Miami, Milan, London, and Paris.
Statement
Bloomvism: A Movement
I invent the architecture of tomorrow. My creative process is the vehicle by which I travel to test my ideas and visualize their evolution. From such odysseys, I return with animated film, moving image, and narrative sculpture as artifacts that tell visual stories from the future about how environments can improve life in ways never imagined. I invent at all scales: from small tools, to buildings, to cities. Exhibited in museums, galleries, art fairs, academic conferences, and publications internationally, these visions are vibrant, visionary, and (r)evolutionary.
When we reach for what we can become, we see better ways to solve for what we have not yet been. For this reason, I architect the future as an art, through a style and philosophy I call Bloomvism — where form fuels growth. With science-fiction thinking, I unlock architectural futures at the nexus of neuroscience, emerging technology, and nature to reimagine how we, as a humanity, design for our own perception, and subsequent evolution. Thus, each of my creations is made to help grow and actualize human potential.
Since the earliest days of my architectural design education, I have been inspired and influenced by the Swiss-born German artist, Paul Klee. His teaching that “movement underlies the growth and decay of all things” has deep influence on my philosophy and practice of art and design. As he writes how “a line is a dot that went for a walk”, he teaches how a point can grow to become a line, and how a line can grow to become a column, and how a column can grow to become a wall. These early concepts still hold as I continue to ideate projects that focus on transformation and evolution.
For me now, movement is threefold: first, it is a physical action; second, it is a collective push toward a vision; and third, it is the stirring of the soul that ultimately fuels the previous two. With movement, we grow or decay. It is my hope that through my ‘time-travel’ creations, I use movement to inspire, nurture, and innovate beneficial growth that uplifts our world. I make visions to help humanity 'bloom'.