Critic, author, and award-winning journalist Maureen “Mo” Ryan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and has written for Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Salon, GQ, Vulture, The Hollywood Reporter, TV Guide, Slate, and Polygon. Ryan, who was named the best TV writer in America by Complex in 2013, previously worked as the chief television critic at Variety, Huffington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Her 2023 book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, which the New Yorker called “galvanizing,” hit the New York Times and Los Angeles Times best-seller lists. The chapter on the TV drama Lost excerpted in Vanity Fair made news around the world, as have an array of her other stories on Hollywood misconduct, abuse, and exploitation. Ryan, who lives in Chicago and has a Master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, served for many years on the juries of the Peabody Awards and the AFI Awards.
At MacDowell, Ryan wrote about half of the first draft of a book about the 2003-2009 TV drama Battlestar Galactica. That book, Battlestar Galactica: The Untold Story of the Revolutionary TV Drama, will be published by Mariner Press in 2028, and will contain in-depth interviews with the acclaimed drama's cast and creative team, and delve into its relevant and urgent examinations of spirituality, war, political repression and unrest, and what it means to be human
