About Helen

Helen Arase Vargas is a scientific photographer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. She was previously contracted with The Boeing Company as a defense, space and security photographer at the El Segundo satellite production facility.

Before stepping into aerospace, she was a photojournalist and reporter, doing occasional graphic design work for Natalie Parker & Co. and teaching documentary photography at the University of La Verne.

She was the final multimedia reporter and managing editor for the Alhambra Source – a nonprofit news site founded by journalist Michael Parks and USC Annenberg – covering the western San Gabriel Valley and East Los Angeles areas of Southern California. The Source ceased publication in November 2020 due to lack of funding. Pages can be viewed on the Internet Archive.

Some of her earlier work on California’s strippers unionizing for better wages for Los Angeleno was picked up by the Huffington Post. Additional Los Angeleno assignments included coverage of Wasteland Weekend, a “Mad Max” post-apocalyptic-themed festival in the Mojave Desert.

Helen received her Master of Science in Journalism from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in May of 2018. She was inducted into the national communications honor society Lambda Pi Eta at USC.

While at USC she worked with the Los Angeles Times as part of a group of journalists who coded and visualized data for a marijuana-related interactive, followed California's lowriders for a documentary film and photography project, and partnered with KCRW to report stories using virtual reality and emerging technologies of people who have been deported and those they left behind. Her documentary aired on Southern California’s Spectrum News 1 in May of 2019.

Helen also wrote about bipolar disorder, the mental health care in the Los Angeles County jails and support available upon returning to society, and multiracial millennials and white privilege. Her day-of-air radio packages focused on politics and the refugee crisis in Europe and South Asia.

Helen received her BA in journalism with a concentration in photojournalism in January of 2016 at the University of La Verne. She was a member of the photography staff of the university’s newspaper and magazine, Campus Times and La Verne Magazine. Helen also founded and curated a photographic gallery dedicated to showcasing student work from the Photography Department of the University of La Verne.

She is a former member of the Society of Professional Journalists, National Press Photographers Association, Asian American Journalists Association and Journalism and Women Symposium.

Helen is pursuing skills in UX/UI design, graphic design and motion graphics for data visualization.