Toni Schlesinger is a journalist, theater artist, and fiction writer. She was the author of "Shelter", a long-running column in The Village Voice between 1997 and 2006, and in New York Observer between 2006 and 2007.^[1]

A selection of her columns in The Village Voice appear in the book Five Flights Up, published in 2006 by Princeton Architectural Press. Tom Hanks praised the book as a must-read. Playwright Tony Kushner, in his review of it, wrote, "Toni Schlesinger’s book describes this relationship of the accidental to the profound, the domestic to the totally weird; she visits, draws out and celebrates this permanent impermanence better than anyone ever has."

Prior to her affiliations with The Village Voice and New York Observer, Schlesinger was a writer and columnist for the Chicago Reader from 1977 to 1992, where she collaborated with illustrator Tom Bachtell.

Works

Schlesinger's theatrical career as a writer, designer and performer includes the following works:

• The Mystery of Pearl Street at Dixon Place, 2014; inspired her seventeen-year investigation of the real-life 1997 disappearance and presumed murder of artists Camden Sylvia and Michael Sullivan following a dispute with their landlord.^[2] Reviewing The Mystery of Pearl Street, The Village Voice wrote that the "material is genuinely fascinating."^[3]

• The Mystery of Oyster Street at Dixon Place, 2012; a fictional, two-person interrogation play starring Drew Hildebrand and Esme Von Hoffman
• When The World Broke In Two: A Visit With Willa Cather at the Metropolitan Playhouse, 2010 ^[4]
• The Toni Schlesinger Show, Puppet Lab at St Ann's Warehouse, 2007 ^[5]
• Lobster Village, at HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program at the Great Small Works Toy Festival, 2003, for two puppets.