Joan Acocella is an American journalist who is dance critic for the The New Yorker. She has written several books on dance, literature, and psychology.

Acocella received her B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes.

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.

Her books include Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2004), Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder (1999), and Mark Morris (1993), a biography of modern dancer and choreographer Mark Morris. She also edited The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition (1999) and Andre Levinson on Dance (1991).

External link

• "What Critics Do", Joan Acocella, Dance Ink, 1992