Paula Mejía is a Colombian-American writer and editor from Houston, Texas. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and teaches an Arts Writing Practicum for graduate students specializing in the art of writing profiles, features, and criticism within the arts.

She is the contributing Los Angeles culture editor at SFGATE, reporting on Southern California subcultures and communities. Previously she was the arts and entertainment editor at the Los Angeles Times, overseeing coverage of visual and performing arts, classical music, architecture, and dance, a senior editor at Texas Monthly, and a cofounding editor for NPR Music’s Turning the Tables, a project that subverted the male-dominated musical canon by centering women and non-binary musicians’ works that received a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media in 2018. 

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Oxford American, Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, Criterion Collection, The New York Times, NYMag, and other publications. She is the author of a volume in Bloomsbury Press’s 33 1/3 book series, about The Jesus and Mary Chain’s seminal work ‘Psychocandy’, published in 2016. She was also an executive committee member of MoPop Conference, and a mentor with ASME Next, the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, and the Latinas in Journalism Mentorship Programs.