Sasha Anawalt is associate professor and director of arts journalism programs at USC Annenberg, including the Master's degree program in arts journalism, a unique partnership at USC that integrates the five arts schools toward a single goal: engendering better arts, culture and entertainment coverage. Anawalt also directs the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, and leads many experimental journalism projects that create and test innovative digital media practices, systems and tools, often using L.A. as a living laboratory.

In 2012, she and her colleague Douglas McLennan produced Engine30, an interdisciplinary media enterprise that brought students together with Getty Fellows and three media partners (Los Angeles Times, KCET and KPCC). In 2011, Anawalt and McLennan co-produced Engine28.com and Engine29.org, interactive “pop-up” arts news sites with content mainly provided by professional journalists on fellowships though USC Annenberg.

Anawalt’s best-selling cultural biography, “The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company,” was re-issued in 2012 as an e-book, timed to coincide with the release of a feature film documentary that aired on PBS, “Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance.” Anawalt was chief dance critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and LA Weekly and, for nearly a decade, was the voice of Dance Notes at KCRW, National Public Radio. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, SoHo Weekly News, Montreal Gazette, Dance Magazine, TV Guide, KUSC and MSNBC-online sites.

Anawalt served on the 2006 and 2007 Pulitzer Prize Committee juries for criticism. She is a frequent host and speaker for the dance series at the Music Center and at USC’s Visions and Voices. She is a board member of USC Fisher Museum of Art, the LA Stage Alliance, and Art Sanctuary in Philadelphia. She is a research fellow at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, and also serves on the advisory board of Jacaranda: Music at the Edge of Santa Monica. A native of New York City and graduate of Barnard College, Anawalt lives in Pasadena with her husband; they have three children.