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. I also contribute cartoons to The New Yorker.

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!
MISCELLANY (2018 - 2022)I've designed the visual identity and websites for various clients. For The Maintainers, I created a punch-card to help people say no! In early 2020, I created the ironic apology generator igotcancelled.club. After, around the onset of COVID-19, I developed a "hope" generator, still available on my Github. I also designed Rough Cut Collective’s website in 2020. In 2022, I designed the typographical environmental layout for Sarah Newman's interactive art installation at the Spencer Museum of Art. In 2023, I built the website for the History Design Studio, reviving Bruce Mau's 2013 rebranding for the Hutchins Center.