Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1,500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005. From 2003 to 2005, Mr. Rich was the front-page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion. He also serves as senior adviser to the Times’ culture editor on the paper’s overall cultural news report.

Mr. Rich was previously a columnist on the Op-Ed Page starting in January 1994. In 1999, he began writing a 1,400-word opinion piece that ran on the Op-Ed page every other Saturday (instead of the 700-word piece that ran twice a week) and was given the additional title of senior writer for The New York Times Magazine. The dual title was a first for The Times and allowed Mr. Rich to explore a variety of topics at greater length than before. His columns and articles in each venue have drawn from his background as a theater critic and observer of art, entertainment and politics.

Before writing his column, Mr. Rich served as The Times’ chief drama critic beginning in 1980, the year he joined The Times. During the presidential campaign year of 1992, Mr. Rich joined with The Times’ Washington reporter, Maureen Dowd, to write a daily column at the political conventions, repeating the assignment for Inauguration week in Washington in January 1993.

Among other honors, Mr. Rich received the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. In addition to his work at The Times, he has written about culture and politics for many other publications. His latest book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, was released in paperback in fall 2007. His childhood memoir, Ghost Light, was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. The film rights to Ghost Light have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment. A collection of Mr. Rich’s drama reviews, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993, was published by Random House in October 1998. His book The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.

Before joining The Times, Mr. Rich was a film and television critic at Time magazine. Earlier, he had been film critic for The New York Post and film critic and senior editor of New Times magazine. He was a founding editor of The Richmond ( Va. ) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970s.

Born in 1949, in Washington, D.C., Mr. Rich is a graduate of its public schools. He earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson, an honorary Harvard College scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the recipient of a Henry Russell Shaw traveling fellowship.

Mr. Rich has two sons. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the author and novelist Alex Witchel, who is a reporter for The New York Times.

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