She expanded the essay into Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2000).Ī 2012 review by Acocella of Henry Hitchings's The Language Wars drew criticism from Jan Freeman and Mark Liberman. She also edited The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition (1999), André Levinson on Dance (1991), and Mission to Siam: The Memoirs of Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell (2001), her grandmother.Īcocella's New Yorker article 'Cather and the Academy,' which appeared in the Novemissue, received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York and was included in the “Best American Essays” anthology of 1996. Her books include Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder (1999) Mark Morris (1993), a biography of modern dancer and choreographer Mark Morris and Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (2007), which explores the virtues common among extraordinary artists. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1992 and served as its dance critic from 1998 to 2019. Her writing also appears regularly in the New York Review of Books. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes.Īcocella has written for The Village Voice, has served as a senior critic and the reviews editor for Dance Magazine, and was the New York dance critic for the Financial Times. in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. She has written books on dance, literature, and psychology.Īcocella received her B.A. Joan Acocella (née Ross, born 1945) is an American journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Guggenheim Fellowship ( dance research, 1993).

Mark Morris by Joan Acocella