Alissa Wilkinson is a Writer and teacher living in New York City.

She’s a movie critic at the New York Times, and the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine (2025) and Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women (2022).

Alissa has taught courses in creative nonfiction writing and the humanities since 2009. She writes about cinema, art, media ecology, technology, food, and history — and, especially, where they all intersect.