Donna Bilak is an independent scholar of early modern visual culture, currently affiliated with NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and formerly at the Pratt Institute. Her research centers on steganography, visual cryptography, and the hidden codes embedded in early modern alchemical imagery. Her doctoral work and subsequent postdoctoral research at the Science History Institute (then the Chemical Heritage Foundation) focused on Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens as a steganographic object — an artifact that conceals messages within its visual and structural design, accessible only to readers trained in the conventions of alchemical and mathematical reading.

Bilak co-edited Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020) with Tara Nummedal. The project, developed through Brown University Library's Digital Publications Initiative with Mellon Foundation support, won the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History from the American Historical Association — the most prestigious award in digital humanities. It represents the first born-digital scholarly edition of the Atalanta Fugiens, featuring fully searchable text in Latin, German, and English, high-resolution zoomable images, newly commissioned vocal recordings, and interactive tools for exploring the multi-layered structure of each emblem.

Bilak's central contribution is her essay "Chasing Atalanta: Maier, Steganography, and the Secrets of Nature," which proposes that Maier engineered the Atalanta Fugiens as a work of steganography concealing a magic square within its structure. She argues that the fifty sequential emblems can be rearranged according to a mathematical grid whose rows, columns, and diagonals encode hidden relationships — a virtuoso act of concealment that exploits the inherent duality of the emblem form (which simultaneously reveals and conceals meaning). Her analysis identifies patterns of "doubling" — binary pairs and mirror structures — that facilitate exploration of transformation as a central trope.

Bilak's steganographic approach extends beyond the conventional reading of alchemical symbolism (recognizing that a toad represents sulphur, for instance) to propose that the plates contain a second structural layer encoded in formal properties: spatial relationships, geometric proportions, and the sequential ordering of the emblems themselves. This goes further than De Jong's source-critical method into questions of mathematical design and intentional concealment.

For this site, Bilak's work represents the cutting edge of Atalanta Fugiens scholarship. The Furnace and Fugue digital edition is the primary alternative resource for studying the work in its multimedia fullness, and her steganographic thesis poses questions about the depth of Maier's compositional planning that have yet to be fully explored.