Johanna Keller

Faculty

Johanna Keller
Director
Goldring Arts Journalism Program
Associate Professor in Newspaper & Communications
Office: 364A-II
Telephone: (315) 443-2419
Email: jokeller@syr.edu

Johanna Keller teaches writing and communications at Newhouse, directs the Goldring Arts Journalism program, and is a core faculty member of the Renee Crown Honors Program. In 2007, she was nominated by the Goldring arts journalism students and received the Excellence in Graduate Education Faculty Recognition Award that honors professors who are committed to graduate mentoring and who have made a significant contribution to graduate education at SU.

Keller writes about music and culture for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, London Evening Standard, Los Angeles Times, Opera News, Symphony, Musical America, Strad and other magazines in the U.S. and the U.K and she is a regular columnist for the magazine, Central New York: The Good Life. For her essays in The New York Times, she received the 2000 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the 2001 Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York. She has been a 2002 USC Annenberg Getty Fellow in Los Angeles and a 2001 journalism fellow at the Banff Centre in Canada.

From 1997 to 2001, Keller was editor of Chamber Music magazine and during her tenure the publication received its first six national awards for excellence in editorial and design. In 2000, the magazine was acclaimed in the Wall Street Journal: "Chamber Music magazine has been dramatically spruced up since Ms. Keller took the helm in 1997, not just in appearance, but in content and profile. After a five-year hiatus, it returned to the newsstands in 1999, its coverage expanded to include a regular column on jazz."

Keller's current project is editing a collection of essays about the musical pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger. Her most recent books include Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work (CavanKerry Press, 2001), co-edited with Annie Finch and Candace McClelland; and inclusion in the anthology Word Carving: The Craft of Literary Journalism (Banff Press, 2003). For her literary writing she has received the annual Editor's Prize from The Florida Review, an Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYSCA), and an Artist Grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. In 2007 she served as the first nonfiction editor of Stone Canoe, a new journal of arts and ideas from upstate New York, and she is a member of the journal's advisory board.

Keller has lived in Manhattan for three decades where she taught writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School University in Manhattan and held administrative positions at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. A nationally recognized arts journalism advocate, she was elected to two terms on the national board of directors of the Music Critics Association of North America and was a principal organizer of the National Critics Conference that took place in Los Angeles in May 2005, and has served on the Pulitzer Prize Jury at Columbia University. She is a member of PEN America and, since 2005, she has served on the board of directors of the Arts Branch of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse.

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