Michael Kimmelman has written on issues of public housing, public space, infrastructure, community development and social responsibility. He was the paper's longtime chief art critic and, in 2007, created the “Abroad” column, as a foreign correspondent covering culture, political and social affairs across Europe and elsewhere. He returned to New York from Europe in 2011 and his articles since have helped to reshape the public debate about urbanism, architecture and architectural criticism.
A fellow at the London School of Economics, he was born and raised in Greenwich Village, the son of a physician and civil rights activist. He attended Friends Seminary in Manhattan, graduated summa cum laude from Yale College and received his graduate degree in art history from Harvard University, where he was an Arthur Kingsley Porter Fellow. A pianist who still regularly performs as a soloist and with chamber groups on concert series in New York and around Europe, he started as a music critic at the paper, then moved into art.
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and a 2012 Poynter Fellow at Yale, he also contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books.
Presented by Dallas Architecture Forum and Nasher Sculpture Center