Claudia Puig

Claudia Puig is a nationally recognized film journalist. Currently, she is Director of Programming for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and President of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Claudia has been a film critic on National Public Radio’s “FilmWeek” since 2005. She was the lead critic at USA Today for 15 years, and host of the USA Today video series The Screening Room. Before that Claudia was a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times for 11 years. While at the LA Times she was part of a team of journalists that won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Claudia is also a frequent moderator for film-related panels and Q&As and has a consulting business specializing in film analysis and cultural diversity issues. In 2020 Puig won the Excellence in Entertainment Journalism award from the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) and in 2017 she was the recipient of the Roger Ebert Award for Excellence in Film Criticism from the African American Critics Association (AAFCA). She was featured in the Los Angeles Times as one of 14 film critics making media more inclusive and in Indiewire as one of 20 Latin Americans making a difference in American independent film.