Biography

James Panero is an American writer, editor, and cultural critic. As the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, where he has been on staff since 2002, he writes on culture monthly and serves as one of the magazine's art and architecture critics. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, City Journal, New York magazine, the Spectator World Edition, and The New York Times Book Review.

Readers may stay up to date on his writing by subscribing to the "Panero's Latest" newsletter.

A member of the International Association of Art Critics, Mr. Panero lectures on art, politics, and cultural policy, speaking at Yale, Columbia, Brown, Deerfield Academy, Baylor University, The New York Studio School, The College of the Holy Cross, and before the New York Association of Scholars. He has served as a panelist on the National Endowment for the Arts, a visiting artist and Literary Lion juror at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a panelist for the College Art Association, a juror for NurtureArt, and has been a guest on All Things Considered, The Takeaway, The Brian Lehrer Show, The Independents on Fox Business, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, and other programs. In 2013 he was a William and Barbara Edwards Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

As a curator, Mr. Panero has organized Bushwick's Beat Nite, "The Joe Bonham Project" at Storefront Gallery, "Joe Zucker: Armada" at the National Arts Club, and "Bushwick Chronicle: Photography by Meryl Meisler, Writing by James Panero" at Stout Projects.

Before joining The New Criterion in 2001, Mr. Panero was a graduate student in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University, where he was awarded the University Scholarship. His area of focus was late-nineteenth-century French modernism under the advisement of Kermit Champa.

Mr. Panero is a former editor of National Review. He worked in Switzerland as a writing assistant to William F. Buckley Jr. on his novel Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton (Harcourt, 2000). He wrote about the experience here.

James Panero is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where he majored in Classics and was editor of The Dartmouth Review.

Mr. Panero is a contributor to Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts (Ivan R. Dee, 2007), The State of Art Criticism, edited by James Elkins and Michael Newman (Routledge, 2008), Future Tense: The Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval (Encounter Books, 2012), Arts in Bushwick: Making History (AiB 2016), Old House of Fear: A Novel by Russell Kirk (with a new introduction; Criterion Books), The Critical Temper: Interventions from The New Criterion at 40 (Encounter Books), Where Next: Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter Books), and Ralph Ellison: Centurion (Century).

Mr. Panero was born in 1975 and has been a lifelong resident of New York's Upper West Side, where he has served as a trustee of Trinity School and chair of its alumni board. He is a member of the Century Association.

“A preeminent voice of American cultural conservatism.”