critic. essayist.
interviewer.

Soraya Nadia McDonald is an award-winning cultural critic and journalist. Most recently, she served as senior cultural critic for Andscape (formerly known as The Undefeated). She is the 2020 winner of the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism, a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, and the runner-up for the 2019 Vernon Jarrett Medal for outstanding reporting on Black life. She is also an adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. You may recognize her voice from NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour or Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She is also a contributing editor for Film Comment.

Soraya’s essay “‘Believe Me’ Means Believing That Black Women Are People” was published in Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World (Seal Press, 2020) and her essay “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” was published in Bigotry on Broadway (Baraka Books, 2021). She has also written for Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and New York.

Soraya was a 2018 Eugene O’Neill National Critics Institute fellow and a 2022 Princeton Belknap fellow. She is a member of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Television Critics Association. She is a member of the board of trustees of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Before joining Andscape in 2016, she covered pop culture for the Washington Post.

Soraya graduated from Howard University with a degree in journalism. She grew up in North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Princess Buttercup. She is repped by Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary.