Maureen Ryan

Critic, author and award-winning journalist Maureen “Mo” Ryan has written for Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Salon, GQ, Vulture and The Hollywood Reporter. 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 first 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 upon its 2023 release. A number of revelations in Burn It Down made news around the world, as have an array of her investigative stories on Hollywood misconduct, abuse and exploitation.

Ryan received a MacDowell Fellowship in 2025, served for many years on the jury of the Peabody Awards, and has been an expert commentator in the documentaries We Need to Talk About Cosby, Jared Leto: Hollywood's Dark Secret, and This Changes Everything (which is in part based on her reporting on bias in the hiring of directors). Ryan, whose next book is about the award-winning drama Battlestar Galactica, lives with her family in Chicago.