Brian Seibert

Brian Seibert is an American dance critic and journalist who writes about dance for The New York Times, where he is a staff critic. He studied at Harvard University and has spent his career writing about dance in New York. His critical writing has won multiple awards and is considered among the most perceptive dance criticism being published in America. His book What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing (2015) is a comprehensive cultural and social history of tap dance from its African and Irish roots through Vaudeville, the Harlem Renaissance, Broadway and Hollywood, the civil rights era, and the tap revival of the 1980s and beyond. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016 alongside Lillian Faderman's The Gay Revolution, and received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. It has been praised as the definitive account of an art form that is simultaneously deeply American and deeply contested along lines of race and cultural ownership. Seibert continues to write about dance for The New York Times and lives in New York City.