Dagny fell in love with astronomy at a young age, growing up in rural Arkansas where her grandparents ran the town's local funeral home. As a high school senior, she was one of 75 students from around the world chosen to study at the Research Science Institute at MIT. Her research there led her to co-win the prize for Artificial Intelligence at the Intel International Science Fair. She earned her BSc in Astrophysics at Caltech, studying extrasolar planets.
While in college, she captained a microgravity flight team onboard the KC-135 jet out of NASA's Johnson Space Center. She went on to get her PhD in astronomy in Hawai'i, where she started making short films. She graduated with an MFA in filmmaking from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2016. While at NYU, she received the Maurice Kanbar and Leo Rosner scholarships and the National Hispanic Foundation of the Arts Scholarship. Her short thesis film, Tiny Mammals, starring Sophia Lillis (Beverly Marsh, It) received the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Award and is currently on the festival circuit.
Dagny currently lives in Los Angeles where she is the head science consultant on the CBS All Access' show Strange Angel, about Caltech rocket scientists in the 1930s, executive produced by Mark Heyman, Dave DiGilio and Ridley Scott. She is currently working on a TV pilot about a group of scientists disappearing from our Universe after discovering a nearby black hole.