American journalist, dance critic and writer (1945–2024)
Joan Barbara Acocella (née Ross, April 13, 1945 – January 7, 2024) was an American cultural critic. From 1998 to 2019, she was dance critic for The New Yorker. She also wrote for The New York Review of Books for 33 years and authored books on dance, literature, and psychology.
Early life and education
Joan Barbara Ross was born in San Francisco on April 13, 1945, to Arnold Ross, a cement company executive, and Florence (Hartzell) Ross, a homemaker.[1] She grew up in Oakland, California, and received her B.A. in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley.[1] She earned a PhD in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes.[1]
Career
In the 1970s, Acocella was a writer and editor at Random House, where she co-authored a psychology textbook that went on to be reprinted in revised editions for two decades.[1] In the 1980s, she served as senior critic for Dance Magazine, including authoring a piece about her son's performance in The Nutcracker with the New York City Ballet.[1]
Acocella wrote for The Village Voice,[2][3] and was the New York dance critic for the Financial Times. For 33 years, her writing also appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books.[1] She began writing for The New Yorker in 1992 and served as its dance critic from 1998 to 2019.[4]
In 1997, she accompanied Mikhail Baryshnikov on his first trip back to his birthplace of Riga, Latvia since his defection and exile from the Soviet Union in 1974.[1][5]
Acocella's books included Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder (1999);[6] Mark Morris (1993), a biography of modern dancer and choreographer Mark Morris;[7] and Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (2007), which explores the virtues common among extraordinary artists.[8][4] Reviewing Twenty-Eight Artists in The New York Times, Kathryn Harrison called Acocella "knowledgeable without being a show-off, meticulous in her research and energetically conversational", and said her "typical essay thus functions as a tantalizing biographical sketch, as well as a critical study, inviting us to pursue a deeper exploration".[8]
Acocella also edited The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition (1999),[9] André Levinson on Dance (1991),[10] and Mission to Siam: The Memoirs of Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell (2001),[11] her grandmother.
Acocella's 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.[4] She expanded the essay into Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2000), receiving a starred review in Publishers Weekly.[12]
Personal life and death
Acocella died of cancer at home in Manhattan, on January 7, 2024, at age 78.[1] At the time of her death, Acocella's partner was Noël Carroll.[1] She had one son from her marriage to Nicholas Acocella, which ended in divorce.[1]
