Author and Architecture Critic, The New York Times
Daimler Foreign Policy Forum - Class of Spring 2022
Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic for The New York Times and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a nonprofit initiative at The Times focused on exploring some of the world’s biggest challenges through the lens of progress. His work has focused on issues of public housing, public space, infrastructure, urbanism, environmentalism and community development.
Born and raised in New York City, he received degrees from Yale and Harvard, was the Times’ longtime chief art critic, and, based in Berlin for several years, created the “Abroad” column, covering culture, politics, and social affairs across Europe and the Middle East. He has twice been a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize.
An adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, he was also the Annie Sonnenblick Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and the Franke Visiting Fellow at The Whitney Humanities Center at Yale. He is the author of the best-selling An Accidental Masterpiece and contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books.