critic. essayist.
journalist.

Soraya Nadia McDonald is an award-winning cultural critic and journalist. As senior critic for Andscape (formerly known as The Undefeated), she won the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. She is 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 a contributing editor for Film Comment and contributes to Rolling Stone, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and New York.

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).

Soraya was a Eugene O’Neill National Critics Institute fellow and a 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 sits on the board of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Prior to joining Andscape, she covered culture for the Washington Post.

Soraya graduated from Howard University with a B.A. in journalism. She grew up in North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn. She is repped by Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary.