Juliana Castro Varón
Short, third-person bio: Juliana Castro Varón is a writer, designer, illustrator and technologist. She’s the senior design editor of the artificial intelligence initiatives team at The New York Times and a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine. Juliana founded the open access publisher Cita Press, where she edited dozens of books, from 15th-century Spanish nun Saint Theresa, to Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf. Cita has received more than a million dollars in funding, mostly by the Mellon Foundation, and is now sponsored by Educopia. Juliana is an affiliate and former fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. She’s the author of the illustrated essay collection Papel sensible.
I’m the senior design editor of artificial intelligence initiatives at the New York Times. My team creates tools to semantically search multimedia content, organize unstructured information or analyze large data sets for trends that are hard to parse through. I make software for storytellers and readers. Because of that, 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.
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.