Sharon Waxman


Sharon L. Waxman is an American author, journalist, and blogger who has been a correspondent for The Washington Post and The New York Times, and founded the Hollywood and media business news site TheWrap in early 2009.

Biography

Waxman grew up in a Modern Orthodox, Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio. She graduated from Barnard College in 1985 and from St. Antony's College, Oxford University in 1987 with a Masters of Philosophy in Modern Middle East Studies.

Career

Journalism

Waxman was a foreign correspondent in Europe and the Middle East from 1989 to 1995. In 1995, she moved to Los Angeles to cover Hollywood for The Washington Post. In 1998, Waxman won the feature writing award for Arts & Entertainment from the University of Missouri. In 1999, she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by The Washington Post for her work covering the second Palestinian intifada. In 2000, she won the Penney Award. Between 2001 and 2003, Waxman covered stories in the Middle East for The Washington Post.
In 2003, she began covering Hollywood for The New York Times. In 2012, Waxman was named the best online columnist at the National Entertainment Journalism Awards. The following year, she won the Distinguished Journalist in New Media from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Authorship

In 2005, she published Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System. The book profiles six directors, including Quentin Tarantino and David O. Russell. In 2008, Waxman published her second book, Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, which explores the global trade in antiquities and the battle by source countries to retrieve antiquities held in Western museums.

Blog

According to CBS Market Watch, Waxman raised $500,000 for The Wrap News, as a news portal site covering entertainment and media, which launched on January 26, 2009. A second round of financing was closed in 2010. By 2013 TheWrap.com had grown into a site with 30 employees. It also convenes an annual conference attended by leaders in entertainment, media and technology called TheGrill. TheWrap was nominated as the Best Entertainment website in 2012 and named the best online news site in both 2012 and 2009 at the National Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.