University of Florida Master of Fine Arts student and Astronomy Ph.D. candidate, Natalia Guerrero, often thinks about the surreal experience of returning home to the Sunshine State to cover the launch of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2018.
“It was a totally wild experience to be driving my mom's old car—the car that had driven me to middle school—onto the ‘backstage’ area of the Kennedy Space Center,” she recalls.
Guerrero, whose parents are Mexican American and Uruguayan American, grew up in Orlando, Florida. She spent her undergrad years researching dark matter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she received her Bachelor of Science in physics with a minor in creative writing in 2014. Next, Guerrero worked in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research testing cameras for TESS, and after the launch, she managed the catalog of planet candidates from the data being beamed back to Earth from the exoplanet-seeking satellite.
Today, Guerrero’s exoplanet research continues at UF, where she is a fourth-year Ph.D. in astronomy candidate at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, while simultaneously pursuing her MFA at the School of Art and Art History (SAAH) in the College of the Arts.
“In the same way that I would write a piece of code, or write an equation on a dry erase board, I want to use the tools I have in artistic expression to better understand my own work and understand how I am situated—not just in the lab or in the scientific space, but also in my community and in society,” Guerrero says.
On any given day at UF, Guerrero’s coursework sends her shuttling from the Bryant Space Center to the Fine Arts C building, to the Constans Theatre, and to the off-campus GRADhaus MFA studio.
“My day-to-day looks like a lot of walking; zigzagging across campus,” Guerrero says. “But I'm never really mentally switching … I use just one notebook. I think that’s a useful metaphor for myself—that everything goes into it—because to me, it's all part of how I think. I'll be in an astronomy colloquium, for example, and I'll be thinking, ‘I wonder what would happen if you did something with this idea in an artistic context?’ Or I'll be in the studio, and I'll think … ‘could you program this in a different way?’”
Why not both? Pairing scientific study with the arts
“There was a point when I was president of my high school writing club, but I was also taking calculus, and—I hadn't really thought of myself as a math and science person up until that point—but I was starting to get really engaged with the math and science questions,” Guerrero says.
“It took me my whole freshman year at MIT to decide that I was going to major in physics because I was thinking, ‘I really don’t want to give up on the creative energy I have for writing and for thinking creatively in this way.’ I made a promise to myself very early on that I was going to do everything I could to maintain that.”
While pursuing her physics degree, Guerrero embedded herself in MIT’s humanities program, where she studied playwriting as part of her writing minor.
“This may sound funny from a person who studied physics, but that was one of the hardest classes I took at MIT,” Guerrero says. “Playwriting is such a challenging form. It's different from any other type of writing—from poetry or short stories, or anything else—but I loved it. And I started realizing that the plays I was writing were about scientists. They were about people like me.”
When she wasn’t working alongside particle physicists, Guerrero worked various roles as a DJ, producer, sound engineer, and sketch comedy writer at MIT’s campus radio station, WMBR.
“When most people think of MIT, they think ‘robots and nerdy people.’ At first, I was the same. I was like, ‘surely I am going to have to talk in binary code when I come here,’” she recalls. “But, no—MIT has an incredible arts area and all these people who are thinking in interdisciplinary ways. It was very natural for me to go straight from my quantum mechanics class to my short story class or my playwriting class.”
While working at the radio station, Guerrero says, “I realized that something that I really loved was being part of a creative team … working in collaboration, asking musicians to come into my lab and record sound, or writing goofy radio pieces about science or speculative science fiction. I was playing with ideas of how to explore my scientific identity through this other medium.”
Guerrero’s writing and radio background, combined with her Spanish language fluency, made her an ideal candidate to cover the TESS launch at Cape Canaveral in 2018 as a science communicator on NASA’s press team.
“Learning how to communicate science for the public was something I learned very quickly on the job. I especially enjoyed speaking to students and seeing that their scientific curiosity starts very early. Sixth, seventh, and eighth graders were asking the same questions that people with Ph.Ds. are asking. That was where the thread of advising and teaching was starting to get pulled out for me,” Guerrero says.
When she returned to Cambridge to manage TESS data, Guerrero worked with the Harvard-Smithsonian Science Research Mentoring Program. Working with Greggy Bazile, a high school student in the mentoring program whose primary focus was art and design, “crystallized that this is something I want to do,” Guerrero says.
“I thought, ‘okay, if I want to advise both art students and astronomy or physics students, then what do I need?’ And you generally need a terminal degree— an MFA for arts, and a doctoral degree for astronomy. At the same time, I also wanted to deepen the rigor of my own understanding of the arts. I was reading, going to lectures, trying to learn as much as I could on my own—but I was really craving that deeper, more rigorous understanding of the art world.”
Establishing an artistic practice
In 2021, Guerrero joined her mentor, astrophysicist Sarah Ballard, Ph.D., at UF and began a Ph.D. in astronomy. She also worked with SAAH associate professor of art and technology, Katerie Gladdys, and School of Theatre and Dance (SOTD) faculty to chart an MFA path that maps intersections between interstellar science, art, theatre, and museum studies.
“When I came into grad school, I was interested in having a ‘big as possible’ tool set for realizing artistic ideas,” Guerrero says.
“I chose specifically to apply to the School of Art and Art History,” she explains, “because I was interested in the museum space and the installation space—and in learning the language of the fine arts for describing my thought process. I’m interested in how my work, which is really rooted in my scientific practice, feels in these spaces.”
Guerrero’s first large-scale artistic collaboration was in 2019, when she collaborated with MIT lecturer and composer Elena Ruehr, Ph.D., to design a concert for the inaugural TESS Science Conference at MIT.
“Hundreds of astronomers and astrophysicists were descending onto campus, and we were going to share results from the first year of this exoplanet discovery mission,” Guerrero recalls.
“I was like, ‘this is a huge opportunity to do something for our community that helps us realize the magnitude of what this is,’ so I reached out to Elena and said, ‘I'm an astronomer. I'm really interested in creating a piece of vocal music that helps astronomers get into a reflective space where we can be like, oh, my gosh, we did this—and also, there's so much more to do.’”
Ruehr composed two new vocal music pieces based on text created by Guerrero that incorporates research paper titles from the TESS mission, and Shakespearean sonnets.
Meanwhile, Guerrero created visuals using images from the telescope combined with a collection of video clips themed around light and reflection from her mother, artist and arts non-profit director, Maria Guerrero. The Lorelei Ensemble performed Ruehr’s works, titled Exoplanets and Not From the Stars, with the accompanying visual projections, to an audience of 500 scientists and the greater Cambridge, Massachusetts public.
“I was like, okay, this is the kind of artist I want to be. This is my lab where I want to experiment and try to create spaces where people can come—and they're not necessarily looking at graphs or data, but they're in this creative, imaginative space where they're having an emotion. Maybe you're having a mystical experience. Maybe your brain is churning through scientific ideas—but you're not in either pure art or science context anymore,” Guerrero says.
“This is when I became very interested in: how do I create more of these spaces? It is the animating idea that drove me into the artistic practice I have now—and that eventually led to Story of a Photon.”
Story of a Photon and SOUND MOVES
Ever since her days in MIT radio, creative collaboration has remained a distinct throughline in Guerrero’s art practice.
In Spring 2024, Guerrero teamed up with Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME) visiting maker in residence, Braxton Rae, to produce Story of a Photon, an ensemble performance that incorporates elements of devised theatre and dance to tell the story of a particle of light traveling from a distant star to the eye of an observer on Earth.
Guerrero cites Rae’s devised theatre work and SOTD visiting associate professor Millicent Johnnie’s storyboarding and creative development methods as significant influences on her writing process for Story of a Photon. SOTD MFA students Sarah Sulewski and Alan Toney cast the ensemble and co-directed the performance, with Guerrero providing scientific consultation in a role she describes as “science dramaturg.”
Story of a Photon premiered at the Harn Museum of Art’s May 2024 installment of Art After Dark, an “Eyes to the Sky” astronomy-themed evening that featured a mobile planetarium provided by the UF Astronomy Department and space-themed art-making activities led by CAME.
“Having astronomers there, having people from the arts departments there, having people who were part of the Gainesville community there, was very important for me—for us all to be in one space at the same time and be experiencing this piece of work through very different lenses,” Guerrero says.
Guerrero returned to the Harn in November 2024 to perform in SOUND MOVES, a project that pairs composers from the UF School of Music (SOM) with dance students to create performance pieces responding to artworks in the museum galleries. Guerrero danced a solo improvisation accompanied by SOM graduate composition student Xiaowei Cao's piece, Portraits of Death, inspired by Professor Katerie Gladdys’ video work, Continuous Compost, in the In Our Time SAAH faculty art exhibition.
“This project, which came out of my work with SOTD professor, Xan Burley, was my first big foray into dance improvisation, so in that sense, it was a brand-new experience for me. On the other hand, I was in conversation with both Katerie and Xiaowei about their thought process and approach to their own pieces, and that kind of co-creative collaboration is my favorite way to work,” Guerrero says.
Science inspires the artist; art informs the scientist
Guerrero says that the rigor of scientific methodology and critique informs how she approaches her art practice. Conversely, her cross-disciplinary fluency in the arts informs her scientific endeavors.
“As a scientist, your ideas are tested from so many angles. Explaining your chain of reasoning is a crucial part of the process. I can’t help but bring that with me when I am trying to explain a new idea in the studio,” she says.
“I'm trying different things—with text, with performance, with movement, with installation—to see what's stimulating to the scientific imagination … What are the ways to zoom in on the process of being creative in a scientific context? What does that mean and how does that feel? What feeds those ideas? I have the tools to explore those questions because of the work I'm doing as an artist.”
And although “science communicator” is one of many hats Guerrero wears as an astronomer, she emphasizes that the primary aim of her artistic practice is not to translate science to the public; rather, to interrogate and decipher the space she inhabits in the scientific community.
“The direction of my work right now is digging into what my experience is as an astronomer and how that feels for me, specifically—being a woman, growing up in a multicultural household, being a second generation student—and how it feels to be in the space of astronomy; how my education in physics felt, how my research has felt, and how I, in my identities, work in this field,” Guerrero says.
“I spend a lot of time talking to my astronomy colleagues and to the members of my research group, to pull out what that experience is like for all of us and to test my ideas—to say: ‘Does this feel true to you? Does this resonate with you? How does this experience feel to you and in your body? And: what does it mean to be a scientist existing in community?’
We come from a lot of different and often underrepresented backgrounds. We have people in the group that are first-generation students. A lot of us are the only scientists in our community or in our families … Being able to lean on my astronomy community to help me test my ideas as an artist, and to help me plumb those areas of ‘what is my identity as an astronomer?’ has been really helpful.”
She continues: “I also find it really affirming to see, through the work of other scholars like astrophysicist, Professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, and museum studies scholar, Professor Porchia Moore here at UF, that the interdisciplinary approach to science is actually a very natural and very necessary way to make sense of the world.”
“A misconception that I've had to unlearn for myself,” Guerrero concludes, “is thinking that science is this neutral, objective endeavor. It's not! It's deeply entangled with the human who is doing the science. And I think that's such an exciting jumping-off point in both the frameworks of my astronomy and artistic research."
Guerrero’s book on exoplanets for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series will publish in late 2025. Find updates and pre-order info as it becomes available here.
Learn more about Guerrero and follow her work at: www.NataliaGuerreroArt.com
Follow her on Instagram at: @nataliaguerrero.space.
