Hidden Figures (Shetterly) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—Hampton, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Virginia
• Currently— Charlottesville, Virginia


Margot Lee Shetterly was born in Hampton, Virginia, in 1969 where she knew many of the women she later wrote about in her debut Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race.

Shetterly's father worked as a research scientist at NASA-Langley Research Center, and her mother was an English professor at Hampton University. She attended Phoebus High School and graduated from the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce.

After college, she moved to New York and worked several years in investment banking, first on the Foreign Exchange trading desk at J.P. Morgan, then on Merrill Lynch's Fixed Income Capital Markets desk. She then made the transition to the media industry, working at a variety of startup ventures including the HBO-funded website Volume.com.

In 2005, she and her husband, the writer Aran Shetterly, moved to Mexico to found an English-language magazine called Inside Mexico, for expats. The magazine operated until 2009.

From 2010 through 2013, they worked as content marketing and editorial consultants to the Mexican tourism industry.

Shetterly began researching and writing Hidden Figures in 2010. The book was published in 2016, and its 2017 film version stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, and Kevin Costner.

In 2013, Shetterly founded The Human Computer Project, an organization whose mission is to archive the work of all of the women who worked as computers and mathematicians in the early days of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/6/2016.)