Carla Maria Penz (born October 17, 1961) is a butterfly comparative morphologist and systematist, and the former Doris Zemurray Stone Chair in Biodiversity at the University of New Orleans.

As an undergraduate at Universidade Federal do the Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), she volunteered at Museu Anchieta, where she started to study butterflies.

She worked as a Curator of Lepidoptera (2000-2004) and Section Head of Invertebrate Zoology (2003-2004) at the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin.

Along her career, Penz has studied butterfly genetics, natural history, herbivore-plant interactions, wing morphology as related to flight, and phylogenetic systematics.

Morphology is the main source of data for her work on phylogenetic systematics, a field of biology that focuses on the evolutionary diversification of living organisms.