Framing the Cosmos Through Art and Imagination

Cassandra Klos grew up in a self-declared “Trekkie household,” where science fiction and outer space weren’t far-off frontiers but constant companions that flickered across her television, threaded through dinner-table conversations and took up permanent residence in her imagination. 

In elementary school, that fascination found a gravitational pull in Christa McAuliffe. Though Klos was born after the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the legacy of the Concord teacher-astronaut remained deeply embedded in classrooms across her home state of New Hampshire.

“Many of my teachers had known Christa,” she explains. “When they’d share her stories in class, I just thought she was still up there [in space] teaching space kids.”

Her childhood logic may have been off, but the message wasn’t. Klos saw a world where teachers — and women — had a rightful place in space travel. “She wasn’t just a history lesson, Christa was a reference point and really impacted what I thought a life of exploration could look like, even at such a young age,” Klos shares. 

Back home, another influence was quietly shaping how Klos would one day tell her stories. “My father always kept a Polaroid camera within arm’s reach,” she recalls. “Having a camera handy made photography feel less like an activity and more like a reflex.”

Klos had always been an “artsy kid” who loved learning about science and space as much as building dioramas and drawing. But by high school, her camera had eclipsed anything illustration had to offer. “I could set up a scene, take the picture and be done,” she explains. “Photography was almost this immediate gratification and gave me the freedom to envision and build greater scenes than I could with a pencil and paper.” 

That freedom to explore brought her to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, where she earned her B.F.A. and developed a thesis project reimagining the purported abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961. For Klos, the work deepened her fascination with the edges of science fiction, space and storytelling. 

Graduate school followed, with several options: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MassArt and the School of Visual Arts in New York. But it was her professor-mentor, Jim Dow, who suggested the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFAEDA) at Duke. 

“I quickly fell in love with the interdisciplinary program and the structure,” she shares. “My studio could be outdoors, giving me the space to continue building bold worlds, plus the connection to the Center for Documentary Studies felt expansive.” 

Klos learned how to look at images not just to see, but to interrogate them. The MFAEDA program offered a rare combination of structured documentary training paired with the freedom to experiment, letting her push and pull at the rules of the form. “That combination allowed me to think across a broader landscape, test new approaches and really refine my trajectory,” she says, “while the critiques and feedback taught me to see my work from multiple perspectives and to understand how others engage with it.” 

Always an intrepid traveler, the vast Southern terrain, which is much different from her native New England, shaped her MFA thesis By No Other Name. Documenting individuals in the small, resilient communities she encountered, Klos continued to circle a constant question that has echoed throughout her work: Who’s out there? 

Her penchant for extreme landscapes, however, predates Duke. Klos was comfortable venturing into remote terrain through analog Mars missions, where simulated expeditions placed crews in Mars-like environments on Earth. From 2015 to 2017, she served as artist-in-residence at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah and later commanded Crew 181, the first all-artist mission; she also worked as a crew journalist for the 2020 HI-SEAS Selene II-V mission. In 2023, she commanded the inaugural mission at Arizona’s SAM Analog.

The MFAEDA didn’t redirect her path so much as refine it, giving her tools to align her artistic instincts with her fascination for space. “It taught me to find the trajectory I’m striving for and stay steady,” she says, “while still trying new things.”

Klos continues to orbit the intersection of art and exploration. Currently, she’s a photo correspondent for The New York Times, assigned to document the Artemis II Moon Mission. She also serves as a NASA Solar System Ambassador and volunteers with the Christa McAuliffe Center for Integrated Science Learning, extending the legacy that first inspired her. And she recently completed a Moon-simulated mission at the Lunares Research Station as part of the World’s Biggest Analog.

As for whether she’d entertain a trip to Mars, she’s pragmatic: nine months there and nine months back is a long time. But would a trip to the Moon be on the table? “If a seat opened on Artemis II, I wouldn’t hesitate.”