Claudia Puig

Claudia Puig​ is the president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and along time critic on NPR’s Film Week. She teaches a college class on Diversity in the Media and is in demand in as a moderator and speaker on film-related panels. She is also program director for two film festivals, in Mendocino, CA and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In addition, Claudia has a film consulting business specializing in cultural consulting. Previously, she was USA Today’s film critic for15 years. During that time, she also hosted The Screening Room video series and wrote film reviews and analytical articles about the film industry. Before that, she was a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times for 11 years covering city government, courts, the entertainment industry and Spanish language media. She has been a speech writer and diversity consultant for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A native Spanish speaker, Claudia has a B.A. in Communication Studies from UCLA and an M.A. in Communications Management from USC. She was recently featured in the Los Angeles Times as one of the 14 film critics making media more inclusive, in Indie wire as one of 20 Latin Americans making a different in American independent film, and is the winner of the Roger Ebert Award for Excellence in Film Criticism from the African-American Critics Association.