Valentina Maria Deshler is a Project Assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht–Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock). She assists the Arsht-Rock’s Communications team with media monitoring, social media, storytelling, and website editing. Specifically, she aids in amplifying the Center’s messaging regarding the danger and imminence of extreme heat, as well as actionable steps to protect vulnerable communities from it. Valentina is passionate about bridging the gap between climate justice and vulnerable communities by increasing accessibility to and engagement with information, resources and tools that can help to protect lives and livelihoods. 

Before joining the Atlantic Council, Valentina was an undergraduate student double-majoring in Political Philosophy and Studio Art at the University of Virginia (UVA) College of Arts and Sciences, as a University Achievement Award Scholar. At UVA, she worked as an online curator for the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab, specializing in stories of migration. She engaged in collaborative research, digital content organizing, and web editing .using the Smithsonian’s digital resource archive, to build interactive learning experiences and teaching materials for educators of sociology, history and geography. This experience, combined with her academic focus on political justice and her grassroots activism work in marginalized communities sparked her passion to examine climate change through a social justice lens, inextricably linked to issues of race, class, and migration. 

Valentia has experience as a writer and editor for her student publications, International Dateline, Faust and VMag, as well as at the School of the New York Times, where she was a featured as a keystone speaker. Her experience in investigative reporting on forced migration, incarceration, human rights and international criminal law, and public health has honed her capacity for effective storytelling.  

Valentina is a split-generation American with a multicultural, Hispanic background and speaks Spanish and Portuguese.