Margot Lee Shetterly

Margot Lee Shetterly was raised in a middle class black community in Hampton, Virginia. Her father was a climate scientist at the NASA-Langley Research Center and her mother was an English Professor at Hampton University. She attended the University of Virginia, where she studied business, and then she moved to New York, where she worked at several prestigious investment banking firms and media startups. After marrying writer Aran Shetterly, the two moved to Mexico in 2005 to start a magazine for Anglophone expats in Mexico, and Shetterly began writing and researching Hidden Figures while living in Mexico in 2010. To support her writing, Shetterly has received fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Hidden Figures was released as both a book and an Oscar-nominated movie in 2016. Shetterly is also the founder of the Human Computer Project, which aims to be a complete record of women who contributed to research at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.