Claudia Roth Pierpont is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she has written on subjects ranging from the Ballets Russes to Nietzsche to Mae West. A collection of her essays, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (Knopf) was published in 2000, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has received a Guggenheim Foundation grant and has been a Fellow at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers. She holds a doctorate in art history of the Italian Renaissance from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts.