The Nieman Arts & Culture Reporting Fellowship

The Nieman Foundation established the Nieman Arts and Culture Fellowship in 2007 with support from Harvard’s Office of the Provost. The fellowship was created in response to dwindling arts and culture coverage by news organizations across the country as budget cuts caused deep staff reductions.

Currently funded by the Nieman Foundation, the fellowship is designed to nurture and promote vibrant, meaningful arts and culture reporting that in the end leads to greater understanding and appreciation for the value of arts and culture in society.

The Nieman Fellowship in Arts & Culture Reporting is awarded to a U.S. journalist specializing in arts and culture reporting in years when a qualified candidate is found. Full-time staff and freelance journalists who work in all
Megan O'Grady
media, including print, broadcast, photography, film and the Web are eligible to apply.

Megan O’Grady, a contributing editor at Vogue, is the 2012 Arts and Culture Nieman Fellow. As the magazine’s book critic, she writes a monthly column with an emphasis on literary fiction and cultural biography. Her interview subjects have included Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, Hilary Mantel, Julie Otsuka and Diane Keaton. In a series of “Lives” columns, she has re-examined influential women of the past, from writers — Djuna Barnes, Anna Akhmatova, and Edith Wharton — to other historical figures, such as Cleopatra, Coco Chanel, and Gypsy Rose Lee. She also covers books for Vogue.com and has contributed to the New York Times Book Review, Nylon, Granta, Berlin Stories, and Men’s Vogue. She has taught at Pratt Institute. Based in New York, she has lived in Poland and Germany.

At Harvard, she is examining the relationship between women novelists, literary criticism and the canon, focusing on postwar American literature and the persistence of gender myths in cultural discourse.