Short-ish, third-person bio: Juliana Castro Varón is a writer, designer and technologist. She’s the senior design editor of AI Initiatives at The New York Times and a cartoonist for The New Yorker. In 2017, Juliana founded Cita Press, a publisher of dozens of books—from Renaissance nun Saint Theresa, to Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf. Cita has received more than a million dollars in funding, and is now sponsored by Educopia. Juliana has received fellowships from Fulbright, Mellon, and Harvard, where she’s a 2025-2026 Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Juliana’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. I make software for storytellers and readers; tools to semantically search multimedia content, organize unstructured information or analyze large data sets for trends that are hard to parse through. 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 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.