Melissa Navia

Melissa Navia stars in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds as Lt. Erica Ortegas, helmsman of the USS Enterprise. Born and raised in NY, she is a Colombian-American actor and writer who has portrayed a myriad of singular characters on both the stage and screen, including roles on Billions (Showtime), where she played an astronaut bound for a life on Mars, and Dietland (AMC), where she played a vigilante on a mission of retribution for crimes against women. Other TV credits include Bull (CBS), New Amsterdam (NBC), and Homeland (Showtime).

Navia made her Off-Broadway debut at INTAR, a theatre company known for its history of championing new works by Latin playwrights, with a critically acclaimed performance in the world premiere of C. Julian Jiménez’s Bundle of Sticks. Her filmography includes over a dozen indie films, including Bel Canto with Julianne Moore, Sleeping with the Fishes with Gina Rodriguez, and Amira & Sam with her Strange New Worlds co-star Paul Wesley.

While Erica Ortegas is new to the world of Star Trek, her surname pays homage to creator Gene Roddenberry’s original vision for the crew of the Enterprise. Navia is honored to  originate a role that, much like Strange New Worlds itself, has been almost 60 years in the making. Ortegas embodies the ideals of Starfleet and the adventurous optimism at the heart of the franchise. Navia’s own STEM outreach and space advocacy work is an extension of her on-screen work. She harnesses the power of storytelling and interdisciplinary collaborations to engage, educate, and inspire audiences. Recent events of note include partnering with NASA to interview astronaut Michael López-Alegría aboard the International Space Station and hosting the National Space Society’s 2024 International Space Development Conference.

Navia is also a stand-up comedian who plays the banjo and is trained in martial arts and  sword fighting. She is the creator of Girl With Short Hair, an essay collection and one-woman show based on her stories, memories, and adventures, drawn from a lifetime of thwarting categorization and challenging society’s fixation on boxing people in to avoid figuring them out.