Soraya Nadia McDonald is the 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 , where she is a contributor. She is als
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 was a contributing editor for Film Comment and has contributed criticism to Fresh Air with Terry Gross . Soraya’s writing heroes are Toni Morrison, Dorothy Parker, Lorraine Hansberry, Pauline Kael, James Baldwin, Molly Ivins, Glori
Soraya was a 2018 Eugene O’Neill National Critics Institute fellow and 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 , where she focused on issues surrounding race, gender, and sexuality . Soraya graduated from Howard University wi