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Niela Orr


Niela Orr is a writer from Philadelphia. In addition to being a columnist for The Baffler, she is a deputy editor at The Believer and a contributing editor of The Organist, an experimental arts-and-culture podcast and radio show from KCRW and McSweeney’s. She is a 2019 Eleanor Kagi Foundation Writer-in-Residence at the Black Mountain Institute. Formerly one of BuzzFeed’s first Emerging Writer Fellows, her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, BuzzFeed, Elle, The Believer, Salon, and the blog of the Carnegie Museum of Art.

In 2015, she graduated from the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts. While there, she lead sections on critical writing and the arts and co-taught a fiction workshop in Echo Park, Los Angeles. A recent Juniper Scholar, she was selected to represent CalArts for the Los Angeles Public Library’s Writing Our Future reading series. She’s also read and performed at REDCAT, Elephant Arts Space, and Human Resources.

You can find some of her (very) occasional musings on Twitter @nielaorr and more info at nielaorr.com. Her email address is niela.orr [at] gmail.com.