About Mariana

Mariana Prieto is the Founder and Director of Blue Horizons at Conservation International—the first design-led innovation studio embedded within an international conservation organization. Her team is dedicated to innovation, communications, and scaling global ocean conservation efforts while overseeing the integration of human-centered design and creative confidence across the organization.

Launching her career in the early days of design for social impact, Prieto has been at the pioneering forefront of design-led innovation for humanity, climate and conservation.

She started her career as an IDEO.org Global Fellow and has since led design and innovation teams in partnership with IDEO, IDEO.org, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WildAid, Who Gives a Crap, Polymath Ventures, and many others.

Prieto was a founding member of The International Rescue Committee's innovation center, Airbel Impact Lab, where she led teams working on the Ebola crisis in West Africa and the redesign of refugee resettlement across the United States. 

Prior to joining Conservation International, she founded Design for Wildlife, a creative collective dedicated to pioneering human-centered design for wildlife conservation challenges.

Over the course of her career, Prieto has been honored with several prestigious recognitions, including the Lui-Walton Innovators Fellowship in 2023, the ArtCenter College of Design Young Innovator Award in 2021, TED Residency in 2018 and 2019, and had her work exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in 2018. 

She has previously served as Adjunct Professor at ArtCenter College of Design and has been a guest lecturer/speaker at various institutions, including Berkeley Haas School of Business, Stanford University, Microsoft, IDEO, CIID, North American Congress for Conservation Biology, and The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur.

She currently serves on the Board of Trustees at ArtCenter College of Design.

Prieto and her husband, Danny Alexander, have lived in five cities over ten years and have now settled down with their family in Los Angeles, California. For now.