Justin Davidson

eMusic Contributor

Justin Davidson has been the classical music and architecture critic at New York magazine since 2007. Before that, he was classical music critic at Newsday, where he also wrote about architecture and won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2002. A native of Rome, Davidson graduated from Harvard and later earned a doctoral degree in music composition at Columbia University. He has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times, W., Travel and Leisure, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and Salon. He has taught writing at the School of Visual Arts, Syracuse University, and the NEA’s annual Arts Journalism Institutes.

After spending a year on a music fellowship in Paris, Davidson moved to New York City to pursue a doctoral degree in music composition at Columbia University, where he also was instructor and later adjunct professor of music. His compositions, which have been performed in the US, Italy, China and Eastern Europe, have won him grants and awards from the American Academy/ Institute of Arts and Letters, the Mellon Foundation, Meet the Composer, Columbia University and the Fondation des Etats-unis in Paris.

He joined the staff of Newsday in 1996. In 2003, he added a second beat to his brief, becoming the paper’s first architecture critic.