The Boston Theater Critics Association is a small organization of professional critics who volunteer to sponsor the Elliott Norton Awards and select the honorees including:
Joyce Kulhawik is the president of The Boston Theater Critics Association and is best known as the Emmy award-winning arts and entertainment critic for CBS-BOSTON (WBZ-TV 1981-2008). She is currently lending her expertise as an arts advocate and cancer crusader all over the region. Kulhawik has covered local and national events from Boston and Broadway to Hollywood. She co-hosted the nationally syndicated movie-review show HOT TICKET with Leonard Maltin, and was a continuing co-host on ROGER EBERT & THE MOVIES. The recipient of countless awards for her advocacy, Kulhawik also received an Honorary Doctorate in Communications from her alma mater Simmons College, and was honored by The Berklee College of Music with an endowed scholarship in her name. She is also a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, and writes for EXHALE Magazine a lifestyle publication for women. Kulhawik continues to perform as a guest narrator and has performed with The Boston Pops, The New England Philharmonic, Boston Musica Viva, The Boston Civic Symphony, and The Concord Orchestra. Look for Joyce online at JoycesChoices.com
Don Aucoin is the chief theater critic of The Boston Globe and a coauthor of the top-10 New York Times best-seller “Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy” (Simon & Schuster). He covered politics for the Globe from 1991 to 1997, and was a TV critic from 1997 to 2000. In 2000, Aucoin was named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. His story on Boston’s race relations is included in the book “Best Newspaper Writing 2006-2007.” He is a member of the adjunct faculty at Boston College, where he teaches writing.
Jared Bowen is an Emmy-winning reporter with WGBH-TV’S nightly magazine program, “Greater Boston with Emily Rooney.” His coverage takes him from breaking news to politics to arts and culture. In his regular “Center Stage” segments, he covers the latest in the Boston area’s theater, art, music, dance, and film scenes. He also serves on the Board of Governors for the Boston/New England chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In over a decade with WGBH, he has produced four news documentaries for “Greater Boston” and he produced the first three seasons of the station’s “Eye on Education” initiative. He has won two New England Emmy awards for his arts reporting. He began his career at “Dateline NBC” in New York and is a graduate of Emerson College, where he also won several Associated Press awards.
Terry Byrne is a freelance writer whose work appears frequently in the Boston Globe, and a critic who contributes to WGBH-TV’s “Greater Boston.” For 11 years she served as chief theater critic for the Boston Herald and, for eight years before that, was the Herald’s arts editor. She has been writing about the arts for two decades and her articles have appeared in Boston magazine, Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News, the Toronto Star and the Asbury Park Press. She is a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center and an adjunct faculty member at Boston College.
Carolyn Clay is a contributing editor and chief drama critic for the Boston Phoenix. An actress turned critic, she graduated from Denison University and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Boston University. While still in graduate school (where she was mentored by Elliot Norton), she began writing theater and book reviews for Boston After Dark. In 1973, she joined the staff of the Boston Globe as a cultural reporter. She has written for the Phoenix since 1975. Her film criticism has appeared in England’s Tatler magazine and New York’s 7 Days. Her writing about the arts has also appeared in the New York Times and Esquire and New York magazines. She is a past recipient of the prestigious George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism.
Nick Dussault has been an entertainment writer and the chief theatre critic for the Boston Metro for the past 10 years. Prior to that, Nick was a City Editor for AOL’s Entertainment Web Sites (Digital City) in Chicago, Tampa and Boston.
Iris Fanger was a dance and theater critic at the Boston Herald from 1987 to 1999. She has been an arts journalist since the early 1970s, contributing to such outlets as the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, the Phoenix, the New York Times, Dancing Times (London), and the Patriot Ledger, in addition to her longtime association with Dance Magazine. From 1973 to 1995, she was Dean of Students and then Director for 17 years of the Harvard Summer Dance Center. As former director of the Tufts Magic Circle Theater and a professor at Lesley and at Tufts, she helped train many actors. A former Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe, she holds a B.F.A. in theater from Columbia University, an M.A. in theater from Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. in Theater History from Tufts University. She was co-curator of “George Balanchine: A Life in Ballet,” an exhibition that ran at the Pusey Library, Harvard University. In 2007 she received the Dance Champion Award from Boston Dance Alliance, in 2008 the Outstanding Career Achievement Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University.
Sandy MacDonald, a double dropout (The Putney School and Barnard), was studying at HB Studio in 1969 when she became an editor and translator (Barthes, Jodorowsky, et al.) for TDR: The Drama Review, then at NYU; in 1970 Joe Papp invited the staff to initiate the journals Performance and Scripts at the Public Theater. In 1972 the Provincetown Playhouse staged her translation of Dacia Maraini’s Il Manifesto (commissioned by the feminist literary journal Aphra, which she helped edit). Moving to Boston in 1974, she embarked on long editorial stints as arts editor at New Age magazine and, later, slush czar at Houghton Mifflin, while freelancing for national magazines on parenting and travel (she published four related books). Having covered New England for TheaterMania.com since 2002, she now reviews in New York as well, as a member of the Drama Desk. She sings with the Oratorio Society of New York.
Kilian Melloy reviews theater and film for EDGE Media Network (EDGE Boston, EDGE New England) and is a member of several critics’ groups, including the Boston Online Film Critics Association. He has also reviewed film, books, and other media for a number of publications and websites.
Robert Nesti has been writing about the theater and arts in Boston since 1989 for such publications as Bay Windows, In Newsweekly, the Boston Herald, the Bay State Banner, Community Newspapers (the TAB network), and the Improper Bostonian. He is presently the National Arts and Entertainment Editor for EDGE Publications, a network of web portals in East Coast cities aimed at the gay and lesbian audience. In his other life he is a graphic designer.
Ed Siegel was for a dozen years the theater critic of the Boston Globe, where he worked since 1971. He had been the assistant editor of the Living/Arts pages before his stint as television critic from 1983 to 1995, when he became theater and at-large critic. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston University, where he edited the school newspaper, The News. Before coming to the Globe, he initiated television coverage for the Phoenix (then called Boston After Dark), and was also one of the founders of The Real Paper. He was a member of the 2002 jury for the Pulitzer Prize in drama. He currently reviews theater and the arts for WBUR-FM, and con- tributes to the Phoenix, Berkshire Living magazine, and the Globe.
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