Today we’d like to introduce you to Mariana Ortiz.
Hi Mariana, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I often describe my story as the story of a girl who kept saying yes before she felt ready, and then figured out the rest on the way.
I grew up in Medellín with a very specific obsession: I needed to understand how things are imagined before they exist. Not who built them, but who conceived them. That question led me to Product Design Engineering at EAFIT University. What I did not know at the time is that every hour I spent learning how materials behave, how structures carry load, and how systems interact was quietly building the foundation for everything that would follow. Engineering teaches you to think in three dimensions before anything exists on paper. It trains you to ask not only “what does this look like” but “why does it hold together.” I did not fully understand why that mattered until I was standing inside a shipyard years later, and it suddenly made perfect sense.
From there I pursued a Master’s degree in Yacht Design in Italy, stepping into one of the most selective and specialized disciplines in the creative world. There are roughly 50 recognized yacht design studios operating globally at the highest level of the superyacht industry. The total number of individual professionals who can credibly call themselves yacht designers, with formal training and shipyard experience, is a few hundred worldwide. It is a field that demands mastery of naval architecture, structural engineering, luxury interior design, materials science, and craftsmanship, all at once, all at scale. I arrived with 60% English and zero Italian. What I had instead was discipline, obsession, and an absolute refusal to fail.
Italy changed everything. I learned Italian the way I approach every challenge in my life: completely. When you refuse to use your native language as a safety net, when you force your brain to live inside a new one from the moment you wake up until the moment you sleep, the language stops being a subject you study and becomes the air you breathe. Within months I was presenting design concepts at Italian shipyards in a language I had not spoken a word of when I arrived. That experience confirmed something I carry with me every day: the limits we think we have are almost always much softer than they feel.
I went on to join Azimut|Benetti’s Design Department, one of the most prestigious yacht groups in the world, and later collaborated alongside one of the designers I had most admired from afar. Each chapter built on the last. I never lost sight of the objective, and I learned early that clarity of priority is everything. There are always distractions, always easier paths, always reasons to slow down. Reaching the next level requires saying no to many things that feel good in the short term.
Today I am in Miami, completing an MBA in Business Analytics. While finishing my degree I also created my first sculpture collection, My First Prayer, which debuted at Art Basel Miami 2024 at Aura Copeland Gallery, with one piece exhibited aboard a yacht. Medellín to Italy to Miami. A girl from Latin America who has moved through some of the world’s most competitive creative cities, carrying a background that very few people have, and who is just getting started.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Not at all. And I am grateful for that.
Leaving Medellín to build a career in a field where almost nobody from Latin America operates was not a comfortable decision. Yacht design is dominated by European professionals with decades of generational knowledge in naval culture. I did not come from that world. What I brought instead was an engineering mind, an obsessive work ethic, and a clear picture of where I was going.
I remember sitting in rooms at Italian shipyards, surrounded by people who had been breathing this industry their entire lives, thinking: “A girl from Medellín. Here.” Not with arrogance. With genuine, quiet disbelief. And with a firm decision that I was not leaving.
The real struggle was not the language or the distance. It was the moments of self-doubt that come when you are far from home, competing at the highest level, and the voice in your head tells you that maybe you do not belong here. What I learned is that discipline is not the absence of doubt. It is the decision to act anyway, consistently, without waiting for certainty that never fully comes.
I also learned that achieving the next level sometimes requires giving up good things to make room for better ones. I have said no to comfort, to distraction, to the easier version of the story. That is not sacrifice. That is strategy. And every time I made that choice, the next door opened faster than I expected.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am a yacht designer, which is one of the rarest professional designations in the creative world. To understand how rare: the superyacht industry employs approximately 150,000 people globally across all functions, from captains and engineers to crew and builders. Of those, the designers who specialize specifically in yacht design, with formal training and hands-on shipyard experience at the superyacht level, number in the hundreds worldwide. There are more recognized design studios in Manhattan than there are credentialed superyacht designers on the entire planet. I am one of them, and I am from Medellín.
What makes my profile genuinely unusual in this industry is the engineering foundation underneath the design. Most yacht interior designers come from an arts or architecture background. I came from Product Design Engineering, which means I do not just specify a material for how it looks. I understand how it performs, how it ages in a marine environment, how it interacts with the structural systems around it. At Azimut|Benetti and in subsequent collaborations, that technical layer was the thing that allowed me to contribute at a different level than a purely aesthetic designer could.
I am proud of having contributed to luxury yacht projects for some of Italy’s most prestigious shipyards. I am equally proud of my sculpture collection, My First Prayer, which debuted at Art Basel Miami 2024, with one piece exhibited aboard a yacht, bringing together the two worlds that have shaped my entire creative life.
What sets me apart is a combination that does not exist in many people: engineering rigor, European shipyard experience, fine arts practice, and now a business analytics foundation being built at one of Miami’s leading universities. I bring all of those perspectives into everything I create.
One of my biggest dreams for the near future is to contribute to the energy transformation of the recreational marine industry. Yacht propulsion and construction today carry a significant environmental cost, and the industry is only beginning to seriously address it. Hybrid systems, alternative fuels, sustainable materials, circular design principles: there is an enormous amount of work to be done, and I want to be part of doing it. I believe that the most exciting yachts of the next decade will be defined not only by their beauty but by how responsibly they were built and how cleanly they move through water. That intersection of aesthetics, engineering, and environmental responsibility is exactly where I want to work.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
A cruise with my parents.
My parents gave me a beautiful childhood, so choosing a single memory is genuinely hard. But that cruise stayed with me in a way nothing else has. I remember walking through the ship as a little girl, completely overwhelmed by the scale of it, unable to stop asking questions. Who imagined this? Who decided what it would look like inside? How does something this massive get designed before a single piece of it is built?
I had no idea at the time that those questions were a compass. That the fascination I felt standing on that deck would one day take me to Italy, into the studios of some of the world’s great shipyards, and into a career designing the interiors of vessels far more extraordinary than the one I stood on that day.
What I love most about that memory is what it says about curiosity. A child who asks the right questions, and refuses to let them go, can end up somewhere remarkable. I think about that girl often. And I think she would be proud of where those questions led, and genuinely excited about where they are still taking her.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marianaortizc/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianaortizc/
