New York Drama Critics' Circle
2023-2024
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Emeritus: |
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David Barbour is editor of Lighting&Sound America, a trade publication covering design and technology in live events. He is a theater critic for the magazine’s website. Previously, he was managing editor of TheaterWeek and editor of Theatre Crafts International and Lighting Dimensions. He has contributed articles to Playbill, Stagebill, InTheater, TheatreMania.com, Broadway.com, Entertainment Weekly, ALD Focus and Air Mail, among others. He is currently co-president of the Drama Desk and was previously chair of the organization’s awards nominating committee. He is currently a judge for the Henry Hewes Design Awards. He also edited A Theatre Project, the memoirs of lighting designer and theater consultant Richard Pilbrow. |
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Melissa Rose Bernardo is a contributor to New York Stage Review, and has covered theater for publications including Entertainment Weekly. From 2020 to 2023, she served as co-chair of the American Theatre Wing’s Obie Awards. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied dramatic literature.
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Vinson Cunningham Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, FADER, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. A former White House staffer, he now teaches an MFA Writing course at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City. |
Joe Dziemianowicz reviews and writes features for New York Theatre Guide. From 2006 to 2018, he was the theater critic for the New York Daily News.
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Greg Evans is the theater critic/editor for Deadline.com. He began reviewing theater for Variety in 1990, and was chief critic when he left the trade paper in 1998. He was a senior editor for TV Guide from '98 to 2010, and has written about theater, film, television and music for Bloomberg News, The New York Times, Vulture, Slate, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Guitar World and Yahoo News!, among others. |
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Adam Feldman is the Theater and Dance Editor and chief theater critic at Time Out New York, where he has been a staff writer since 2003. He has written for Canada's Globe and Mail and National Post as well as for Out, Time Out London and Broadway.com, among other publications, and was the contributing Broadway editor for the Theatre World book series. He has been a regular panelist on the public-television shows Theater Talk and Theater: All the Moving Parts; in 2024, he received the Friend of Off Broadway Award from the Off Broadway Alliance. A graduate of Harvard University, he lives in Greenwich Village. He has served as president of the New York Drama Critics' Circle since 2005. |
David Finkle writes regularly for the Clyde Fitch Report and is a contributor at the New York Stage Review. He also contributes theater coverage to, or has contributed to, numerous publications, including The Village Voice, the New York Times, Vogue, the Huffington Post and American Theatre. He is the author of People Tell Me Things, a story collection, The Man With the Overcoat, a novel, and the recently published Humpty Trumpty Hit a Brick Wall.
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Elysa Gardner is a theater critic for The New York Sun and New York Stage Review and contributes to cabaret coverage at The New York Times. She has also written about theater and music for Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Town & Country and USA Today, and has been a contributor to VH1. She served on the Pulitzer Prize drama jury in 2014 and chaired it in 2017. She hosts the podcast Stage Door Sessions for Broadway Direct, and lives in New York with her husband and their daughter and dog. |
Robert Hofler was an editor for 40 years at various publications, including Life, Us Weekly and Variety. In 2013, he became the lead theater critic for TheWrap. He has written several nonfiction books including The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson, Wild Style, The Movie That Changed My Life, Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange, How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos, Money, Murder and Dominick Dunne, The Way They Were and Party Animals, which was turned into the documentary The Fabulous Allan Carr. He lives in New York City. |
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Sara Holdren is a director, teacher, and writer-about-theater from the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia. She is the theater critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, the recipient of the 2016–2017 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and the co-founder of the theater project Tiltyard. Sara lives in Jersey City with her partner, Beau, their feline children, Masha and Danny, and her sourdough starter, Serafina Pekkala. |
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Charles Isherwood is the theater critic for the Wall Street Journal. From 2004 to 2017 he was a theater critic for the New York Times, after which he wrote for the web site Broadway.news. He began reviewing theater for Variety in Los Angeles, and moved to New York to become the trade paper's chief theater critic and theater editor in 1998. He has also written for the Times of London, Opera News, LA Weekly and Town & Country, among other publications. |
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Chris Jones is the theater critic for both the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. A staffer for Tribune Publishing for 18 years, Jones previously covered theater all over America for Variety and Daily Variety, specializing in the Broadway Road during its growth years in the 1990s. Since 2014, Jones has also been the director of the National Critics Institute, a unique 2-week summer program at the Eugene O'Neill Center for mid-career arts and food writers and critics, where he is training a diverse new generation of critics in concert with staffers from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post. His latest book is Rise Up: Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. (Bloomsbury's Methuen imprint). He has taught young critics for decades at DePaul University and elsewhere and holds a doctorate from the Ohio State University. |
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Christopher Kelly is theater critic for NJ.com and the Star-Ledger, where he also oversees the features deparment. Previously he was film critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and film and television critic for Texas Monthly. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Film Comment and numerous other publications. He is also the author of two novels, A Push and a Shove (Alyson Books, 2007), which won the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Debut Novel, and The Pink Bus (Lethe Press, 2016). |
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Brian Scott Lipton has been covering New York theater for over 30 years. He is the chief critic for Cititour.com and a frequent contributor to Theater Pizzazz. In addition, Brian was formerly the editor-in-chief of TheaterMania.com, a critic for the New York Post and editor of Encore Magazine. He is a graduate of Tufts University and New York University Law School. |
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Soraya Nadia McDonald is the cultural critic for The Undefeated, ESPN’s premiere platform covering race, sports, and culture. She writes about film, television, and the arts. She is also a contributing editor for Film Comment magazine and a contributor to NPR. Soraya was a 2018 Eugene O’Neill National Critics Institute fellow and she is a member of the New York Outer Critics Circle. She is the 2020 winner of the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism. Previously, she was a pop culture writer for the Washington Post, where she focused on issues surrounding race, gender, and sexuality. Soraya graduated from Howard University with a degree in journalism in 2006 and spent six years covering sports before turning her focus to culture wring. She grew up in North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn, New York. |
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Jackson McHenry is a critic for New York magazine and its website Vulture, covering theater as well as film and television. He has worked for New York since 2016.
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Johnny Oleksinski is the theater and film critic of the New York Post, where he started as an entertainment reporter in 2015. Before moving to New York, he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and was chief theater critic of Newcity Chicago.
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David Rooney is chief film critic for The Hollywood Reporter, where he also writes about theater. He began covering the entertainment industry in 1991 for Variety while based in Rome, becoming the paper's chief Italian correspondent and film reviewer in 1994. He relocated to New York in 2003 and became chief theater critic and theater editor for Variety from 2004-2010. He has written about theater for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone and Best Plays Yearbook, among other publications. He served on the nominating jury of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010. |
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Frank Scheck has been covering film, theater and music for more than 30 years. He is currently a New York correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter. He was previously the editor of Stages Magazine, the chief theater critic for the Christian Science Monitor and the Off Broadway critic for The New York Post. His writing has appeared in such publications as The New York Daily News, Playbill, Back Stage and various national and international newspapers. He has provided on-air commentary for the BBC, MSNBC and the Fox Business channel, and has served as the Vice-President of the New York Drama Critics Circle, of which he is a longtime member. |
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Helen Shaw is a theater critic for the New Yorker. Formerly, she was the chief theater critic for New York Magazine, and she has written for Time Out New York, 4Columns, The Village Voice, American Theatre and Art Forum. She teaches theater studies in Tisch Drama at NYU, and she won the 2017–2018 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. |
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David Sheward covers NY theater for Theaterlife.com, TotalTheater.com and CulturalDaily.com. He is the former executive editor and theater critic for Back Stage. He has written three books: It's a Hit! The Back Stage Book of Broadway's Longest-Running Shows, The Big Book of Show Business Awards and Rage and Glory: The Volatile Life and Career of George C. Scott. He served as president of the Drama Desk, the organization of New York–based theater critics, editors and reporters for seven years, and appeared on New York-1 News's On Stage show for over ten years. |
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Michael Sommers has covered the New York and regional scenes since 1981. He was the longtime chief reviewer for The Star-Ledger and the Newhouse News Service and was an editor/writer for Back Stage, Theatre Crafts, and the Best Plays series. He has reviewed shows for The Sunday New York Times, Variety, and the Village Voice, among others. A former President of the Circle, Sommers is a founding member of the New York Stage Review. |
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Marilyn Stasio is a longtime theater critic for Variety. Prior to that she reviewed theater for the New York Post and Cue magazine. Her published books include Showtune, a biography cowritten with Broadway lyrist-composer Jerry Herman, and for many years she was a dramaturg at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. She also writes the crime column for the New York Times Book Review.
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Zachary Stewart is the chief critic and features reporter at TheaterMania.com. He was the listings editor at TheaterMania from 2008-2012. His work as a playwright and director has been seen at The Players Theatre, The Connelly Theater, and The 45th Street Theater. Stewart holds a B.F.A. from New York University. He lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side with his husband and two cats.
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Steven Suskin has been reviewing theater and music since 1999 for Variety, Playbill, the Huffington Post, and other publications. He is founder/publisher of New York Stage Review. His books include Second Act Trouble, The Sound of Broadway Music, and Offstage Observations: Inside Tales of the Not-So-Legitimate Theatre.
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Elisabeth Vincentelli contributes to The New Yorker and the New York Times, among other publications. From 2009 through 2016, she was the chief drama critic at the New York Post. Elisabeth joined Time Out New York in 2000 as music editor; she later served as senior editor, then arts and entertainment editor. Over the years, she has contributed criticism, profiles and essays to publications such the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, The Believer and Entertainment Weekly; she is also the author of Abba Gold (Continuum) and Abba Treasures (Omnibus). She is the co-founder and co-host of the theater podcast "Marks & Vincentelli" with Peter Marks of the Washington Post. |
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Matt Windman began as a summer intern at amNewYork in 2004 and became its theater critic a year later. He has also written for Theatermania.com, Theater News Online and Show Business Weekly. Growing up, he performed in musicals and plays at French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts. He graduated magna cum laude from New York University, where he studied dramatic literature, in 2006 and graduated summa cum laude from New York Law School in 2009. He is also an attorney licensed to practice in New York and New Jersey. He lives in Manhattan.
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Linda Winer was chief theater critic and arts columnist of Newsday from 1987-2017. She has taught critical writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts since 1992 and hosted the “Women in Theatre” series on CUNY-TV from 2002–2007. She was chief theater and dance critic of the Chicago Tribune from 1969–1980, a critic for the New York Daily News from 1980–82 and USA Today from 1982–87. Her awards include two first prizes from the American Society of Features Editors, two New York Newswomen’s Club Front Page Awards and the New York Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award. She has taught criticism frequently at the Eugene O’Neill Center, has judged the Pulitzer Prize for Drama 10 times, five times as panel chair. She received a two-year Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for the Training of Music Critics and received the Distinguished Alumna Award from Northeastern Illinois University in 2013. In 2018, she was given a special award from the League of Professional Theatre Women for her contributions to women and theater. |
