Judith Thurman is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000.

She took a break in between to write the biography of Colette.

David Remnick, who had just taken up the editorship of the magazine in 1999, asked her to come back and start writing about fashion for the magazine. ^[undefined]

She writes about books, culture, and fashion.

In addition to articles about the great couturiers of the last century (Chanel, Balenciaga, Schiaparelli), and the avant-gardists of this one (Rei Kawakubo, Isabel Toledo, Alexander McQueen), Thurman has written about performance art in a piece about Marina Abramović and photography in an essay on the works of Diane Arbus.

Much of Thurman's work focusses on the lives of writers, from Gustav Flaubert to Margaret Fuller.

"Drawn from Life," her Profile of Alison Bechdel, ran in the April 23rd issue. She is the author of the biographies "Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette" and "Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller". A collection of her New Yorker essays entitled "Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire" was published in 2007. ^[1]

Thurman's story on Yves Saint Laurent was chosen for “The Best American Essays of 2003.”

“First Impressions,” her 2008 reportage about the world’s oldest art—the Paleolithic paintings at the Chauvet Cave, in southern France—was the inspiration for Werner Herzog’s film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” She is the author of “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,” which won the 1983 National Book Award for nonfiction, and “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography and the Salon Book Award for biography. The Dinesen biography served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s movie “Out of Africa.” ^[1]