critic. essayist.
journalist.

Hi! I’m Soraya Nadia McDonald. I’m a cultural critic and journalist who publishes the newsletter Soraya [dot] Press (very chic, very smart, you should definitely subscribe). I am available for freelance writing assignments, podcasts, lectures, and panel moderation as an expert on feminism, race, media and culture. I take an at-large approach to culture, which means I write about film, theatre, TV, books, plus the visual and performing arts.

As senior critic for Andscape (formerly known as The Undefeated), I won the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism and I was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. I’m an adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a contributor to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. I’m a contributing editor for Film Comment and I’ve published work in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and New York magazine. I also wrote an exclusive cover story for ESPN The Magazine on Naomi Osaka. Prior to that, I spent 10 years at The Washington Post, where I wrote about culture, sports, and politics.

Several of my essays have been published in anthologies. “‘Believe Me’ Means Believing That Black Women Are People” was published in Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World (Seal Press, 2020). “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” was published in Bigotry on Broadway (Baraka Books, 2021). And my essay “Can a Black heroine fix the stereotypes infecting King Kong?” can be read in Blacktold (Andscape Books, 2022).

I have been awarded fellowships from the Eugene O’Neill National Critics Institute and Princeton University’s Humanities Council. I’m a proud member of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Society of Film Critics. I sit on the board of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.

I graduated from Howard University with a B.A. in journalism. I grew up in eastern North Carolina and I live in Brooklyn with my cats, Cio Cio-san and Radamés.