Joan Acocella

Joan Acocella (1945–2024) was a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. She served as the magazine’s dance critic from 1998 to 2019. Her books include Mark Morris, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, and Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, as well as the essay collections Twenty-eight Artists and two Saints and The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays. She co-edited André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties and edited The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. She received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the New York Institute for the Humanities, as well awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letter and the New York Book Critics Circle. She lived in New York.