Sasha Anawalt is Director of the USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Programs. A faculty member of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, she co-founded the Masters’ degree program in Specialized Journalism (The Arts) in 2008 in partnership with the university’s art schools. Anawalt ran the Getty Arts Journalism Program for 13 years and the NEA Arts Institute for Theatre and Musical Theatre for seven years, both at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. An arts journalism innovator, Anawalt is the co-producer of the Engine Series and founder of DanceMapLA. She has taught dance in a women’s prison in Montreal, been a chambermaid at the Wawona Hotel, co-authored a children’s astronomy textbook for Goddard Space Institute’s late director, Robert Jastrow and interviewed Martha Graham, Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Art Spiegelman, Twyla Tharp, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mary Tyler Moore and Julia Child among other greats.
In October 2009, she directed and produced with Douglas McLennan the first-ever virtual National Summit on Arts Journalism, streamed live from USC Annenberg. She wrote the bestselling cultural biography The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company (Scribner, 1996). Anawalt was dance critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, LA Weekly and for nearly a decade contributed “Dance Notes” to KCRW, National Public Radio in Santa Monica.
Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, SoHo Weekly News, Montreal Gazette, Dance Magazine, TV Guide, the Wall Street Journal, KUSC and MSNBC-online sites. Anawalt served on the 2006 and 2007 Pulitzer Prize Committee juries for criticism. A native of New York City and a graduate of Barnard College, Anawalt serves on the board of the Los Angeles Stage Alliance.
Anawalt may be reached at anawalt@usc.edu or (213) 740-1818.