I'm Bárbara. This is what I'm building.

I'm a Venezuelan architect and artist living in New York, and I've been drawing things since I can remember. Birthday cards stuffed with colored paper and sequins and different typographies. Handmade jewelry I sold as a teenager. Architecture school, where I fell in love with composition, weight, balance, and the idea that everything you put in a space has to have a reason to be there.

All of that is still in the work. It just took me five years to figure out where it belonged.

Where Mali actually came from

In 2020, during the pandemic, my mother gave me an iPad for my birthday. I discovered Procreate, took two online courses, and commissioned my first silk scarf: full of fairies and orchids, two of my favorite things. That was the beginning, though I didn't know it yet.

What followed was five years of trying to find the right container for something I already knew how to do. Dog bandanas for dog moms, which went well commercially but was slowly destroying me because I was sewing and running a business and working a full-time job all at once, so I stopped. Then together with my husband Eduardo, an outdoor and nature brand called "Mali: where adventures begin," which made no sense for a silk scarf once I was honest with myself about it. A direct-to-consumer fashion brand, which I tried for most of 2024 until I admitted that making content under pressure about outfits is not something I actually enjoy.

In November 2025, I arrived at the conclusion I had been circling the whole time: A creative studio dedicated to designing prints with hand-drawn, nature-rooted, story-first work (It only took five years lol).

What I make and why

Every design in this studio begins as a hand drawing and every drawing begins with research. I don't start with a sketch, I start with a question: what is the story inside this thing, and what does it feel like to be in the presence of it?

Alma Tropical is not a scarf with birds and flowers. It is Venezuela, and everything I have lived there and carry with me here as an immigrant. The guacamayas are the freedom Venezuelans have always wanted and the flight that many of them took. The orchids are the natural beauty of the country and its resilience. The colors are the optimism that was never lost no matter what.

Ocean Escape is my father, who passed away when I was 14. He was a nature lover in the deepest sense, the kind of person who watched National Geographic the way other people watch sports. He taught me to love the natural world with everything, and the Miami Beach hut in that design is a gesture to two chapters of my life held together by the same thread.

Metamorphosis is about how change forces you to grow, whether you want it to or not. A woman in a cocoon, a butterfly with eyes that see everything, the lunar cycle in its wings, a woman with butterfly wings at the end.

And Martinis and Pomodoro I made because olives and dirty martinis made me happy and I thought they looked beautiful. That is also enough of a reason.

How I work with people

The most meaningful thing I do at Mali is translate someone else's story into my visual language. A museum commission where I spend weeks inside a collection before I draw a single line. A wedding scarf where the design has to carry both families without being literal about either. A brand that needs a pattern that tells the story of a specific place or idea.

I'm the person you talk to from the first conversation to the finished piece. That is not something I say as a selling point. It's how I work, and it matters to the outcome.

If you have a story worth wearing, I want to hear it.

Mali Creative Studio is based in New York. I work with cultural institutions, boutique hotels, wedding planners, and brands that want something made with a real reason behind it. I also create original surface patterns for fashion labels, stationery brands, and interior studios that want artwork that didn't come from a stock library.

The Museum of the Cathedral of Santo Domingo has been selling my work in their gift shop for over a year. That's the kind of relationship I'm here to build.