Dení López

Dení (she/her) is a designer and participatory action researcher. She works on disaster governance through a lens of justice and community accountability, bridging research, public policy, and grassroots organizing in intercultural and queer contexts. She is currently a doctoral candidate at MIT DUSP, where her research understands socio-environmental disasters as historical processes that accumulate in the territory and deepen inequality in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Her dissertation examines how Indigenous communities, primarily Binnizá, sustain collective life in the face of risk through care, memory, and territorial organization, while challenging and resisting institutional frameworks that often render their governance and resistance practices invisible.

Since 2017, she has accompanied organizations across the region through Bicheeche Diidxa’ (Pasa La Voz), a community–academic collective she co-founded to advance Participatory Action Research (PAR), produce place-based knowledge, and strengthen organizational processes around Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRM). Her practice is grounded in an ethical stance that seeks to subvert academia’s extractive logic, insisting that research has a responsibility to serve communities, not the other way around.

Dení holds a Master in Design Studies (Risk and Resilience) and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University, as well as a Bachelor of Architecture with honors from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has published research and visual essays in editorial spaces at Harvard, MIT, UNDRR, and The Plan Journal.