Zachary Woolfe


Zachary Woolfe is an American editor and former classical music critic. Since 2025 he has been an obituaries editor for The New York Times.

Education and career

As a teenager in the 1990s, Woolfe discovered the online opera magazine Parterre Box by James Jorden, whose pages he "returned to again and again". Woolfe later studied at Princeton University. Although he "had written a little bit for newspapers in college", he had not anticipated a career in journalism. In 2008, however, a friend at The New York Observer asked Woolfe to assist in coverage of the 2008 US Open tennis tournament. After additional writing for the paper, Woolfe was offered a regular column in 2009, devoted to opera.
In 2011 Woolfe started working as a freelance music critic for The New York Times, reporting on opera festivals in the US and internationally. In 2015 he became classical music editor, before being appointed as chief classical music critic in 2022.
In July 2025, the Times announced the reassignment of Woolfe—alongside critics such as Jesse Green and Jon Pareles—into new, unspecified roles.

Selected writings

  • Articles

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