Editor-in-Chief, Vanity Fair
Radhika Jones: Biography at a Glance
- Radhika Jones is the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and previously held senior editorial roles at The New York Times, Time, and The Paris Review.
- She joined Vanity Fair from The New York Times, where she was Editorial Director, Books, overseeing daily and Sunday reviews and expanding the desk’s digital coverage at the intersection of books, news, and ideas. As deputy editor at Time, Jones led the editorial and aesthetic direction of the weekly magazine and steered the multi-platform Time 100 and Person of the Year franchises.
- Prior to joining Time, Jones was the managing editor of The Paris Review, where she commissioned and edited fiction and nonfiction pieces. She also was the managing editor at Grand Street, an editor at Artforum, and the arts editor of The Moscow Times, where she began her career.
Biography
Radhika Jones is the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. She previously held senior editorial roles at The New York Times, TIME magazine (where she oversaw TIME's Person of the Year and Time 100 franchises), and The Paris Review. She has also worked as an editor and columnist at Artforum, Bookforum, and Grand Street.
Radhika graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. degree from Harvard and holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Between college and graduate school, she lived in Taipei, Taiwan, where she taught English as a second language, and in Moscow, Russia, where she worked at the Moscow Times—an independent English-language daily—as an editor and, for a short while, the restaurant critic. At Columbia, Jones was a research assistant to the American cultural critic and historian Ann Douglas, and taught writing to undergraduates. Her own work focused on the Victorian and 20th-century novel, postcolonial theory and criticism, and the history of English studies. Her dissertation examined late-20th-century rewritings of canonical novels, including Foe (J.M. Coetzee), Jack Maggs (Peter Carey), The Hours (Michael Cunningham), and Possession (A.S. Byatt).
Since her appointment in December of 2017, Vanity Fair has grown its audience significantly, and the magazine has been widely recognized for its fresh new direction, beginning with her first, groundbreaking cover subject, Lena Waithe. Jones' focus has been on repositioning VF as a cultural barometer, and she has led a purposeful modernization of the brand with regard to both its content and its staff while expanding its platform reach to documentary, TV, podcasts, and beyond. Jones’ mission is to capture the zeitgeist, while also looking ahead to identify the most important and influential artists, activists, and intellectuals of our time. The special September 2020 issue “The Great Fire,” guest-edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, with its cover painting of Breonna Taylor by Amy Sherald, was a milestone for the publication, drawing attention to the intersection of art, activism, and social justice. Under Jones's leadership, Vanity Fair’s audience has grown in its footprint, as well as in the breadth of ages, ethnicities, and income levels it represents.
As an editor and journalist, Jones has interviewed a wide range of notable figures including President Barack Obama (for TIME's Person of the Year issue in 2012), Bob Iger, Kathryn Bigelow, James Murdoch, Marilynne Robinson, Peter Carey, John McEnroe, Shonda Rhimes, Brie Larson, Laura Dern, Helen Fielding, and Malala.
Jones was born in New York City and grew up in Cincinnati and Connecticut. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son and serves on the nonprofit boards of The Paris Review and of CARE, where she is co-vice chair.
