The press jury for the sixth International Piano Competition for
Outstanding Amateurs™ was chaired by Doug McLennan. Other members
included some of the nation's foremost music critics.
Doug McLennan, Chairman of the Press Jury; Founder and Editor of
ArtsJournal.com; Director of the National Arts Journalism
Program.
Jeremy Eichler, Classical Music Critic, The Boston
Globe.
Philip Kennicott, Culture Critic, The Washington
Post.
David Patrick Stearns, Classical Music Critic and General Arts
Writer, Philadelphia Inquirer.
Mark Swed, Classical Music Critic, Los Angeles Times.
PRESS JURY BIOS
Doug McLennan is the founder and editor of
ArtsJournal.com, the leading aggregator of arts journalism on the
Internet. He is also the director of the National Arts Journalism
Program. A former concert pianist, Mr. McLennan earned a Master's
Degree in music from The Juilliard School in New York. He has
performed in Asia, Europe, and North America, and lived and worked
in Italy and China, where he spent a year as Artist-in-Residence at
the Central Conservatory in Beijing. He has written on the arts for
numerous publications, including Newsweek, The New
York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall
Street Journal, and the London Evening Standard. He
has been a music critic for National Public Radio's All Things
Considered and is a contributor to the new edition of
Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians. Mr.
McLennan is in high demand as a lecturer on issues of digital
culture, mass media, and journalism, and he also runs an arts
critics institute at the Aspen Music Festival each summer.
Jeremy Eichler is the classical music critic of
The Boston Globe. He joined the paper's staff in 2006
after writing about classical music and other cultural topics for
The New York Times. His reviews, features, and essays have
also appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times, The New Republic, and The Nation. He
is a native of the Boston area and was educated at Brown University
and Columbia University.
Philip Kennicott is the culture critic for
The Washington Post, which he joined in August 1999. In
2000, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Editorial Writing. He
has also covered city politics and urban development and served as
classical music critic for the Detroit News and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he also worked for two
years as an editorial writer. Additionally, Mr. Kennicott is a
columnist for Gramophone Magazine and frequent contributor
to Opera News. Previously, he has worked as senior editor
of Musical America and editor of Chamber Music
Magazine.
Following a 17-year stint as a classical music and theater
critic for USA Today, David Patrick
Stearns joined the Philadelphia Inquirer as a
classical music critic and general arts writer. In 1996, he earned
a Master's in musicology from New York University and has
contributed to publications such as Cosmopolitan,
Opera News, TV Guide, and Gramophone
Magazine. Mr. Stearns has also written for
Stereophile, BBC Music Magazine, The
Independent, and The Guardian, and served as a music
commentator for NPR's Morning Edition program.
Mark Swed has been the classical music critic
for the Los Angeles Times since 1996. Before that, he was
a music critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
The Wall Street Journal, and 7 Days in New York.
He has also worked as a contributing writer for The New York
Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, and
many other national and international publications. Mr. Swed has
received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, the Letter of Distinction
from the American Music Center, a Los Angeles Press Club Journalism
Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in
2007.
