Eric Banks

Eric Banks, Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, is a writer and editor based in New York. A former senior editor of Artforum, Banks was editor in chief of Bookforum from 2003–2008. From 2011 to 2013, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle and was a two-term member of the NBCC board of directors as well as chair of its award committees on Biography and Criticism. He was a judge of the Pulitzer Prize committees in Fiction in 2017 and 2020 and was chair of the judges committee in 2017.

Banks’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Financial Times, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, Aperture, Town and Country, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He has contributed essays to monographs on a number of artists, including Franz West, Christopher Wool, and Grant Wood. Additionally, he has edited numerous catalogs and collections of artists writings and is the consulting editor of the Robert Rauschenberg Catalogue Raisonné.