Juliana Castro Varón


I’m the Senior Design Editor of A.I. Initiatives at the New York Times, and the founder of the open source library and publishing studio Cita Press. I’ve received fellowships from Fulbright, Harvard and the Mellon Foundation. 

Things I like: Good jokes, Times New Roman, memes, the literary line between poor memory and fiction, taking baths, rocks shaped as rocks, rocks shaped as UFOs, when my cat looks like a loaf of bread, crying at the movies, watching sunset. 

Other stuff: I’ve taught at the college level and given talks about art, design, AI, ghosts, and more (you can watch some of them online). I wrote a book about art, beauty, my grandma and Patti Smith. It’s called Papel sensible, and it was published in Spanish by Planeta (you can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in some Spanish-speaking bookstores around the world). I’m writing another one but it’s a secret. 

Online: Insta, Ex Twit, Threads, Arena, Email.
Offline: I’m around!
ARE IMAGES REAL? (2022-2023)

‘Are Images Real?’ is an interactive index of the history of image manipulation, from darkroom tricks of the 1800s to modern-day deepfakes and AI-generated images. It uses a graphic chronology and storytelling to explore the evolution of image manipulation from its earliest days to the present, examining the ways in which photographic images have been altered, distorted, and transformed over time. This project explores misleading photographic manipulation through three key eras: analog and film photography; digital images; and generative artificial intelligence. I created ‘Are Images Real?’ a at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.