Dana Stevens

Dana Shawn Stevens (born June 30, 1966) is an American film critic who writes for Slate. She is also a cohost of the magazine's weekly cultural podcast, the Culture Gabfest. She is the author of a 2022 book about Buster Keaton and the 20th century titled Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century.

Life and career Stevens grew up in Scarsdale, New York; and San Antonio, Texas. She graduated from Vassar College and attained a doctorate in comparative literature from UC Berkeley in 2001 with a dissertation on Fernando Pessoa: A Local Habitation and a Name: Heteronymy and Nationalism in the works of Fernando Pessoa.

She joined Slate in mid-2003, writing the magazine's Surfergirl column on television and pop-culture. Before joining Slate she wrote under the pseudonym "Liz Penn" on her own (now-defunct) website/blog called the High Sign. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.