Joana Varon

Brazilian researcher and activist; Founder Executive Directress and self-described "Creative Chaos Catalyst" of Coding Rights, the Rio de Janeiro-headquartered Brazilian feminist digital-rights organisation she founded in 2015. Coding Rights's own about page names her at the head of a small staff of four; her personal site and Coding Rights body source describe her work as situated at the intersection of feminism, decolonial thinking, and the politics of technology, with a focus on the Latin American region.

Varon's fellowship and affiliation record routes Coding Rights's Latin American feminist-tech research into Global North digital-rights institutions: she was a 2020-21 Technology and Human Rights Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, holds an affiliation with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and is a former Mozilla Media Fellow. She co-initiated the Human Rights Considerations working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), one of several routes by which Coding Rights's methodological work has entered international internet-governance venues. She works with the A+ Alliance on mapping feminist principles for AI development across Latin America.

Varon's named public-output footprint runs primarily through Coding Rights's project portfolio. She co-conceived and coordinates the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies — Coding Rights's interactive card-deck workshop tool on speculative feminist technology design — alongside Sasha Costanza-Chock, in partnership with the Design Justice Network and with design and illustration by Clarote. She leads the Not My A.I. project (launched 2021) alongside Chilean researcher Paz Peña, a feminist-toolkit-and-case-research line documenting AI harms in Latin American public-service deployment from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile; the project's anchor analytical piece, Oppressive A.I.: Feminist Categories to Understand its Political Effects, develops feminist analytical categories that read AI deployment as a question of political power rather than accuracy or fairness alone. Varon also co-created transfeministech.org, chupadados.com, Safer Nudes, and Net of Rights, anchoring Coding Rights's recurring move of pairing technical analysis with creative and storytelling artefacts that route the work to non-technical publics.