Moderator

Natalia Guerrero is an artist-astronomer and an honorary advisory board member of Women in the Arts, Inc. In her work as an astronomer, she studies the evolution and structure of systems of extrasolar planets. In her artistic practice, she uses text-based multimedia performance to extend and examine her scientific identity and practice.

Guerrero is an experienced public speaker and science communicator: while at MIT, she gave dozens of talks to academic and public audiences on TESS, exoplanets, and the interplay of art and astronomy, including as a keynote speaker at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a panelist at SXSW 2019, and a guest on Telemundo and NASA TV. She is also the co-producer for Women in Art’s podcast, AVANT, where she has interviewed professional women artists and art industry leaders.

Guerrero began her research career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she built and tested detectors for dark matter searches at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. In 2016, she joined NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Here, she worked on testing the cameras for the space telescope and, following its launch in 2018, she managed the search for thousands of exoplanet candidates from the millions of stars that TESS observed.

She graduated from MIT in 2014 with an SB in physics and a minor in writing. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in astronomy and an MFA in studio art at the University of Florida.