Kristine McKenna

Kristine McKenna is a journalist, critic, and curator who chronicled Los Angeles culture from the inside for more than two decades. Writing for the Los Angeles Times from 1977 through 1998, she was one of the first mainstream journalists to cover the early LA punk scene as it exploded — while also serving as music editor of the avant-garde magazine Wet and West Coast editor of NME. Her celebrated interviews and profiles — of artists, musicians, filmmakers, and thinkers from Captain Beefheart and Leonard Cohen to Exene Cervenka and David Lynch — have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, and are collected in Book of Changes (2001) and Talk to Her (2004). As a curator she co-organized Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk (Track 16, 1998) and Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle (Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2005), and she produced and co-wrote The Cool School, the documentary about LA's pioneering Ferus Gallery. She co-authored David Lynch's acclaimed biography-memoir Room to Dream (2018), and her papers — documenting decades of LA's art, music, and counterculture — are archived for researchers.