For thirty years I have asked one stubborn question: what conditions allow communities and places to imagine and govern their own futures?
The question came before the career. I am a Guatemalan-born transborder designer who knows what it costs to make a path with no biological map.
amalia deloney
My recurring terrain is cities, watersheds, and the communities navigating between them.
I design conditions. The tools shift — speculative design, experiential futures, more-than-human governance, popular education, law — but the question stays the same: who has standing, whose knowledge counts, and how far into the future are we willing to look.
The Practice Ecosystem: To do this work, I have built an ecosystem where the practitioner, the artist, and the scholar feed one another:
I founded Point A Studio as my practitioner-led speculative design and civic futures laboratory.
I co-lead Widening the Lens, a transnational systems-sensing practice in collaboration with Glo Mayne Davó of Glou Studio (Borderlands).
I publish Seed & Signal, my public journal and living research practice tracking signals, patterns, and futures thinking.
The Work: Imagination is load-bearing civic infrastructure. My work proves it — through The Inundation Accord, a speculative governance workshop where a Chesapeake Oyster, a Night Heron, and sixteen humans negotiated a flood future in 2060 Baltimore, and Asking the Water First, a methodology that positions rivers, creeks, and living systems as the oldest planners in any corridor.
The Current Season: In August 2026, I join Pratt Institute as an Adjunct Professor in the MS Urban Placemaking and Management program, and I am completing my MA in Design for Social Innovation at the University of Cyprus (2027). I am a 2026 Belonging Innovation Lab Narrative Fellow and a recipient of the Baltimore Mayor's Individual Artist Award.
What Guides My Work
Governance as the true center — consent, agency, and standing at every scale
Climate as a reckoning portal, not an urgent crisis to be managed
Neighborhood as the primary civic site
Ancestral and more-than-human knowledge not as correctives to dominant planning, but as its replacement
