Sebastian Smee is an art critic for the Washington Post. He has previously worked for the Boston Globe and for newspapers and magazines in the U.S., the UK, and Australia. He won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2011. He was born in Australia and has lived in Boston since 2008.
While at MacDowell he worked on the final stages of his book about the experiences of the impressionist painters Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet during the siege of Paris and the Commune of 1870-71, Paris in Ruins (Norton, 2024). His previous book, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art (Random House), focused (in one of its four chapters) on some of the same artists in the 1860s.
