Professor María Moreno Carranco studied Architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She simultaneously completed a master's degree in Architectural Design and a master's degree in art in Design at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture and Urbanism from UC Berkeley.

She currently works as a Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Cuajimalpa Campus, where she teaches in the undergraduate program of Socio-territorial Studies and the graduate program of Social Sciences and Humanities.

She participates in the Global Urban Humanities initiatives sponsored by The Mellon Foundation and the Humanities Action Lab based at Rutgers University. She has been invited to give talks at institutions such as the Politecnico di Milano, City University of New York, Harvard, and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

She has been a member of the Council of Experts in Strategic Projects for the City of Mexico City Government and is part of the National System of Researchers.

She has been a visiting professor on the faculty of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley (2015-2016) and at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at TU Berlin (2022-2023). Her recent publications include the book Spaces of Fear: Bodies, Walls, Cities (2021) and Inhabited Worlds: Spaces of architecture, Design, and music in Mexico City (2020).

Her areas of interest focus on how urban processes, spatial practices, and representation systems have been modified in the neoliberal context. Her recent research addresses new ways of doing urban history and tries to understand the relationship between affect theory and non-representational theory with the built environment.