Alicia Delgado - Alcaraz
Alicia Delgado-Alcaraz (she/her/ella) is a designer, educator, and borderland native from the MX–US border region. Born in El Paso, Texas, and raised in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, she comes from the in-between, where life exists in “both-ness” rather than at either end—shaping her perspective on movement, identity, and belonging. Her work centers architecture as a practice of care and cultural continuity, grounded in everyday objects and overlooked rituals. Her upbringing, marked by political and cultural transformation, draws focus to enduring domestic artifacts like the kitchen table—carried across family homes and geographies, and holding the weight of ritual, remembrance, preparation, and lingering conversation. This formative ingredient informs a design practice rooted in memory, care, and resistance.
She is the founder of in//border, a mentorship initiative addressing systemic barriers in architecture education and supporting students transitioning from El Paso Community College to Texas Tech HCoA El Paso and beyond. Its programming, supported by the Priscilla King Gray Fellowship and BCAP, fosters intergenerational threads across borderland communities.
At MIT, Alicia co-founded Shift+W and co-organized Changing Room, an exhibition at the MIT Keller Gallery exploring gender-conscious work in architecture through introspection, collaboration, and the tools we use to navigate identity in academic and professional spaces. She has co-taught Setting the Table: Representing Her, Mapping Recipes as part of MIT’s IAP non-credit workshops, and taught Eating Architecture through the MITES Summer Program. Her teaching spans architectural design from K–12 to undergraduate levels and frames architecture as an embodied, political act, guided by the questions: Who is given space? Whose labor is valued? Who has a seat at the table?
Alicia is currently a Research Assistant at MIT’s Data + Feminism Lab, a Collaborator at BORDERLESS, and a former member of the Madame Architect Next Gen Council.
