Caitlin McShea - Meeting places of art and science, interplanetary thinking, and an imaginative life

Caitlin McShea is that special kind of curious that you cannot help but be inspired by, and she has the intellect to spread that curiosity over any domain. For the past ten years in roles varying from director of art galleries, curator and coordinator of exhibits, and now as a program manager at the Santa Fe Institute, she has been giving language, image, and concreteness to some of the most imaginative and futuristic thoughts of our age.

Caitlin is the Director of the Santa Fe Institute’s InterPlanetary Project, host of the altogether wonderful Alien Crash Site podcast, illustrator and editor of the InterPlanetary Transmissions Volumes, published by the SFI Press, and one half of the space-musing duo Atlantis.

She coordinates events that redefine how we gather and collaborate. She now manages the James S. McDonnell Foundation-funded research track on Complex Time, and the National Science Foundation and NASA-funded research track on Life's Origins, only a couple of the biggest topics to grace the human imagination.

Caitlin studied evolutionary biology at Southwestern University, and earned a Masters in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College. She worked in Contemporary Arts for six years before joining SFI. She is enamored by creativity: its inevitability, its irrepressibility, and, most curiously, its origin. How appropriate to have her on the Origins podcast.

Below is Caitlin’s Five-Cut Fridays music playlist to accompany her episode