Frank Rich

Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005.

From 2003-2005, Mr. Rich had been the front page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion. He also serves as senior adviser to The Times’s culture editor on the paper’s overall cultural news report.

Mr. Rich has been at the paper since 1980, when he was named chief theater critic. Beginning in 1994, he became an Op-Ed columnist, and in 1999 he became the first Times columnist to write a regular double-length column for the Op-Ed page.

From 1999-2003, he additionally served as Senior Writer for The New York Times Magazine. The dual title was a first for The Times and allowed Mr. Rich to explore a variety of topics at greater length than before. His columns and articles in each venue have drawn from his background as a theater critic and observer of art, entertainment and politics.

In addition to his work at The Times, Mr. Rich has written about culture and politics for many other publications. His childhood memoir, “Ghost Light,” was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. The film rights to Ghost Light have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment. A collection of Mr. Rich’s drama reviews, “Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993,” was published by Random House in October 1998. His book, “The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson,” co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.

Before joining The Times, Mr. Rich was a film and television critic at Time magazine. Earlier, he had been film critic for the New York Post and film critic and senior editor of New Times magazine. He was a founding editor of the Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970’s.

Born on June 2, 1949, in Washington, D.C., Mr. Rich is a graduate of its public schools. He earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson, an honorary Harvard College scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the recipient of a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship.

Mr. Rich has two sons. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the author and novelist Alex Witchel, who is a reporter for The New York Times.