Juliana Castro Varón



CARTOONS
 WRITING
 DESIGN
 CITA PRESS
 CONTACT


Short, third-person bio: Juliana Castro Varón is a designer, doodler and technologist. She’s the senior design editor of AI Initiatives at the New York Times, the founder of the open access publisher Cita Press, and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Juliana’s the author of Papel sensible. Her cartoons appear in The New Yorker and in tiny dirty napkins around the world.
Longer, first-person story:

I’m the senior design editor of artificial intelligence initiatives at the New York Times. My team creates computational tools to semantically search multimedia content, organize unstructured information or analyze large data sets for trends that are hard to parse through. We don’t write the news with AI, and human guidance and review is one of our guiding principles. Because I design tools for writers and designers, my work often involves talking to creative people about their process, and learning how technology can (and cannot) help them. I also produce visual stories, mostly about AI and creativity.

I get (and in many cases share) people's skepticism about AI, and it’s part of my job to understand and account for its limitations and biases. I’m curious about how humans relate to technology, and I’m not interested in it for its own sake.
I write, too. My illustrated essay collection Papel sensible came out in Spanish with Planeta in 2022. It’s a book about art, artists, darkroom photography, and love. I also make cartoons for The New Yorker, which are unrelated to my work at the Times. Here are some links to pieces I’ve worked on, and some cartoons:





      BEFORE THAT





      I founded Cita Press, a publisher of open-access books, in 2017. With Cita’s fiscal sponsor Educopia, we raised ≈$1M to create digital readers, bilingual books and ebooks, and ensure our work remains free for everyone. Initially an all-volunteer passion project I started as a student, Cita is a now grantee of the Mellon Foundation, a design studio, a merch store that goes to fairs, and a champion of illustrators and women authors. Cita’s latest book, A Luminous Halo, is a collection of selected writings by Virginia Woolf. 

      I was a 2022-2023 fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, where I researched the history of image manipulation, from spirit photography to AI. Before joining the Times, I was a consultant for Mozilla’s Creative Media Awards, received a Public Knowledge Mellon grant, and worked as a designer in advertising, in-house at a couple of contemporary art museums, and as a freelance. 


                  









      I hold an MFA in Design from the University of Texas at Austin, where I was a Fulbright scholar. I studied visual design at the National University of Colombia and the Politecnico di Torino. I’ve lived in four countries, and speak three languages. I now live in Brooklyn.

       

      My work seems all over the place at times, but connecting people with art and stories is a common thread. From book publishing, research and writing, to building open source software, to public speaking, or even doodling. I am interested in digital literacy for artists and creatives, but I never push technology on anyone, and hold a deep appreciation for contemplation, manual work, and the creative process. 



      PRESS — CBC once called me an expert on failure, plus NYTCo, Wonks & War Rooms, AdobeXD, AIGA’s Eye on Design, and, in Spanish, Afueradentro, Charlas con Charli, El Tiempo, Infobae, CityTV, and Papel sensible as one of the 22 books of 2022.

      SPEAKING — ISOJ, BKC Harvard, Europe Data Protection Congress,  Internet Archive Public Domain Day, HarvardxDesign, Creative Commons Summit, Theorizing the Web, RightsCon. 

      CONTACT — Email is full name minus the last 2 letters at gmail.

         

      TALKS:


      Fellows presentation at the BKC.




      Keynote at IAPP’s European Congress in Brussels.







      If you want to reach out, but don’t know what to start with, here’s a list of things I like: memes, the literary line between poor memory and fiction, laughing, taking baths, crying at the movies, sunsets.  I love sleeping.