About Susannah Gruder

Susannah Gruder is a writer, editor and critic.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, she has covered film festivals including NYFF, Sundance and Tribeca and is an individually-approved Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes. Her criticism has appeared in IndieWire, Hyperallergic, Reverse Shot, MUBI Notebook, Bright Wall/Dark Room, among other outlets, and she was selected to participate in Film at Lincoln Center’s Critics Academy at the 2018 New York Film Festival. She was also chosen as one of Reverse Shot’s Creative Correspondents at the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2020 and 2021 First Look Festivals. She served on the jury for the Critics’ Prize at the 2022 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. She runs the newsletter Mood Elevator, which combines film reviews and personal writing to examine representations of gender and power on-screen.

She covered politics and culture as a video producer at HuffPost, and currently works as a copywriter and freelance critic.

She graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in English and studied film at the Sorbonne in Paris. 

For more, read this profile in the Reverse Shot newsletter.