Claudia Roth Pierpont has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1990 and became a staff writer in 2004.[1] Her subjects include Friedrich Nietzsche, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Orson Welles, the Ballets Russes and the Chrysler Building.
A collection of eleven of Pierpont’s New Yorker essays, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World,[2] was published in 2000. Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the book juxtaposes the lives and works of women writers, including Hannah Arendt, Gertrude Stein, Anaïs Nin, Ayn Rand, Margaret Mitchell and Zora Neale Hurston.[3]
Pierpont has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library.
Pierpont lives in New York City. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art history from New York University. She has been a professor of creative journalism at New York University and Columbia University.[4]