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Dana Stevens (critic)

Dana Shawn Stevens (born June 30, 1966) is an American film critic who writes for Slate.[1] She is also a cohost of the magazine's weekly cultural podcast, the Culture Gabfest.[2] She is the author of a 2022 book about Buster Keaton and the 20th century titled Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century.[3][4][5]

Not to be confused with Dana Stevens (screenwriter).

Dana Stevens

(1966-06-30) June 30, 1966

Liz Penn

Film critic

Life and career[edit]

Stevens grew up in Scarsdale, New York;[6] and San Antonio, Texas.[7][8] She graduated from Vassar College and attained a doctorate in comparative literature from UC Berkeley in 2001 with a dissertation on Fernando Pessoa: A Local Habitation and a Name: Heteronymy and Nationalism in the works of Fernando Pessoa.


She joined Slate in mid-2003, writing the magazine's Surfergirl column on television and pop-culture.[9] Before joining Slate she wrote under the pseudonym "Liz Penn" on her own (now-defunct) website/blog called the High Sign.[6] She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, Bookforum, and The Atlantic[9] and has appeared on several occasions on Charlie Rose and The Brian Lehrer Show. She is a regular on Slate's Culture Gabfest.[10]


Stevens has described herself as "an atheist raised in culturally Christian milieu".[11] She lives in Brooklyn, New York.[9]

Stevens' Slate archive

on Twitter

Dana Stevens