Juliana Castro Varón is a designer, doodler and technologist. She's the Senior Design Editor of AI Initiatives at the New York Times. Before, she founded the open access book publisher Cita Press, was a fellow at Harvard, a Fulbright scholar and a stubborn little baby. Juliana is the author of Papel sensible (Espasa, 2022) and her cartoons appear regularly in The  New Yorker.


    Coming up: I’ll be speaking at IRE in New Orleans. Random links? Here’s an interactive story about being smarter than A.I., an old essay about attention and tenderness, a book by Nellie Bly and a recent cartoon.  

    Cita Press
    Cartoons
    Book

    Other Stuff

    Bio  



    I am the Senior Design Editor of AI 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.¹ Sometimes, I work on interactive stories.² I also make cartoons for the New Yorker, which are unrelated to my work at the Times.

    I founded Cita Press,³ 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 books remains free for everyone. We run a design studio, go to fairs sell merch, champion illustrators from all over the world, and elevate the writing of women authors.

    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 doodling. 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.⁵ Before, I was a consultant for Mozilla’s Creative Media Awards, received a Mellon Public Knowledge grant, was a Fulbright scholar, wrote a book about art and artists (Papel sensible, published in Spanish by Planeta/Espasa)⁶ and worked for multiple contemporary art museums.

    I've been invited to a few podcasts,⁷ and given some talks. Talk to me about jokes, memes, the literary line between poor memory and fiction, taking baths, crying at the movies, sunset or Times New Roman.  I love sleeping.