Antonella Nota is an astronomer with the European Space Agency, at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where she is the Head of the ESA Office. In this role, she is the senior ESA representative for the team and is responsible for Hubble outreach efforts in Europe, which includes the dissemination of the observatory’s results and communications with the public. She also directs all science policies and scientific communications that support the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in Europe.

Born in Venice, Italy, Antonella Nota completed her studies at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Padova, and moved to the US in 1986.  She studies young stellar clusters, in the Milky Way and neighbors, mostly with Hubble and ground based telescopes, because she is interested to know how stars and clusters form.

She strongly advocates combining art and science to spark the curiosity of the public, which has led to several successful partnerships with artists and curators. For example, in collaboration with German artist Tim Otto Roth, she contributed to “From the Distant Past,” which projected signals from distant galaxies observed by Hubble on the façades of buildings in Venice, Italy, New York City, and Baltimore, Maryland. She has also collaborated with curator and historian Anna Caterina Bellati to produce “Our Place In Space”, a science and art exhibit shown in Venice and Chiavenna, where 10 prominent Italian artists were asked to interpret Hubble images.

Antonella Nota has published more than 200 articles in astronomical journals and books, and contributed to numerous press releases and science announcements.  She is a member of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and L’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (IVSLA). She joined ISSNAF in 2020.