Joan Acocella has been 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, Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, and, most recently, Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, a collection of essays. She coedited André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties and edited The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the New York Institute for the Humanities, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the New York Book Critics Circle. She lives in New York.