Obituary of Joan Acocella

January 7, 2024

Joan Acocella, staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the nation’s preeminent magazine journalists and essayists, died on January 7 at her home in New York City after a short illness. She was 78.

She is survived by her son Bart Acocella and daughter-in-law Maura Dougherty; grandchildren Caroline and James Acocella; her partner, Noël Carroll; her sister, Victoria Aguilar (Ed); a nephew, Colin Crosskill; and nieces Heather Kosanovich (Greg) and Juliette Aguilar. She was pre-deceased by her parents, Arnold and Florence Hartzell Ross.

She was born Joan Barbara Ross on April 13, 1945, in San Francisco and raised in Oakland, California. She attended the Anna Head School for Girls, then the University of California at Berkeley, where she graduated in 1966 with a B.A. in English. She spent her junior year studying abroad in Italy at the University of Padua, an experience that profoundly shaped her life and career. In 1984, she received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Rutgers University.

She married Nicholas Acocella just weeks after graduating from college and moved to his native east coast, settling in New York City, which she loved with the zeal of the convert. In 1975, in an extraordinary leap of faith, they bought a loft in the Flatiron District/Chelsea, a former zipper factory that they renovated into the apartment she called home (and office) for the better part of five decades. They eventually divorced, but they were successful co-parents and remained good friends (see this hilariously accurate piece she wrote about Nick and the Feast of the Seven Fishes). Joan was a beloved member of the extended Acocella family long beyond her marriage to Nick, who died in 2020.

She began her career as a book editor, first at Prentice-Hall and then Random House. In the early 1980s, while still working on her doctoral dissertation, she became a dance critic. “Basically, I started writing about dance the way anybody starts,” she said in a recent interview. “I took any assignment that anyone would give me. Anything.”

She started at Dance Magazine, then made stops at the New York Daily News, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, and she has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Since 1998, her professional home has been at The New Yorker, where she served as the magazine’s dance critic for more than 20 years, in addition to writing regular book reviews and taking on other topics up until just months before her death.

Her body of work, both at The New Yorker and elsewhere, demonstrated great breadth and an insatiably curious mind. She wrote about other writers (Willa Cather, Primo Levi, Agatha Christie, Ha Jin), about artists who are household names (Mikhail Baryshnikov, Frances McDormand) and others she thought deserved to be (the puppeteer Basil Twist, the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble in southern India). She covered hangovers and hoarders, profanity and Peter and the Wolf, saints (Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi) and sinners (Richard Pryor, Tony Soprano), Maleficent of Sleeping Beauty and the March sisters of Little Women.

She is the author of several books, including Mark Morris (1993), the definitive artistic biography of the modern dance choreographer; Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder (1999); and The Bloodied Nightgown, a collection of essays that will be published posthumously in February 2024.

She was a heterodox thinker with little tolerance for exhibitionism or gooey sentimentality. Her writing was informed by erudition and meticulous research, but accessibility to readers was a hallmark and point of pride. She was working on two different pieces before her hospitalization in October – retirement was simply not for her. She will be missed by friends, family and colleagues for her irreverent (occasionally salacious, often cutting) wit and love of gossip as much as her intellectual firepower. There was no one better with whom to discuss books, movies and television shows. She was a person of rare intelligence and many highbrow tastes, but with many unpretentious (even childlike) appreciations – announcing at the start of a recent drive to Washington, for example, that what she really wanted was “one of those pizzas in the little box” from the rest stop Pizza Hut on the New Jersey Turnpike.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a contribution to the Mark Morris Dance Group or the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library.

The funeral mass on Saturday, January 13th can be livestreamed at this link: Joan Acocella Funeral Mass.

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