Maria Sanchez is a designer and university professor presently residing in Ituzaingó (Buenos Aires). She is also interested in architecture, communication, illustration and technology. Her research in the fields of Strategic Design and Product Design concentrates on the generation, development and application of tools that facilitate processes of innovation through design. After a degree at the National University of Cuyo, Argentina, she continued her studies under the guidance of Hans Hollein and Carl Auböck at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. She worked for fifteen years in Italy, and then in the United States, collaborating with countless companies known on a worldwide level. After the encounter with Ettore Sottsass in 1985, she worked with the Memphis group, designing the Squash ashtray – one of the smallest objects in the collections of Memphis Milano – marked by a typical overlay of forms and colors.
She later became one of the founding partners of O2 International Ecodesign, and for seven years she was Coordinator of the Strategic Design area of CMD in Buenos Aires. Today she is a strategic design consultant for many companies and government agencies; she is an academic researcher and teaches in various universities in Argentina, Mexico, Panama and Chile. She is a permanent member of the International Council of the School of Architecture and Design of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey, and collaborates on various publishing projects in Latin America.