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Joan B. Acocella (née Ross, born 1945) is an American journalist who is the dance critic for The New Yorker. She has written several books on dance, literature, and psychology.

Acocella received her B.A. in English in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers University in 1984 with a thesis on the Ballets Russes. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993.

Acocella has served as the senior critic and reviews editor for Dance Magazine and New York dance critic for the Financial Times. Her writing also appears regularly in the New York Review of Books. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1992 and was appointed dance critic in 1998.

Her books include Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder (1999), Mark Morris (1993), a biography of modern dancer and choreographer Mark Morris, and Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (2007), which explores the virtues common among extraordinary artists. She also edited The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition (1999), Andre Levinson on Dance (1991), and Mission to Siam: The Memoirs of Jessie MacKinnon Hartzell (2001).

Her New Yorker article "Cather and the Academy", which appeared in the November 27, 1995 issue, received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and was included in the “Best American Essays” anthology of 1996. She expanded the essay into Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2004).

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