Joan Acocella
Joan B. Acocella was an American journalist who served as a dance and book critic for The New Yorker.
Acocella received her B.A. in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. Acocella was a 2012 Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Acocella has served as the senior critic and reviews editor for Dance Magazine and New York dance critic for the Financial Times. Her writing also appears regularly in the New York Review of Books. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1992 and was appointed dance critic in 1998.
Her New Yorker article "Cather and the Academy", which appeared in the November 27, 1995 issue, received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and was included in the “Best American Essays” anthology of 1996. She expanded the essay into Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. (2004).
“Art, like Nebraska, is a journey into thin air, a walk into whiteness, where you lose everything but yourself.”
“What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite... ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.”
“Those who lament the dissolution of the American family-kids with no way to get to Girl Scouts, aging parents put into nursing homes-should remember what it was that kept the American family together: women's blood.”