Kimmelman biography

Kimmelman was born and raised in Greenwich Village, the son of a physician and a sculptor, both civil rights activists. He attended PS 41 and Friends Seminary in Manhattan, graduated summa cum laude from Yale College with a degree in history and received his graduate degree in art history from Harvard University, where he was an Arthur Kingsley Porter Fellow.

He was the New York Times' longtime chief art critic – "the most acute American art critic of his generation," in the words of the Australian writer Robert Hughes.

In 2007, Kimmelman created the Abroad column, as a foreign correspondent covering culture, political and social affairs across Europe and elsewhere.

He returned to New York from Europe in autumn 2011 as the paper's senior critic and architecture critic, and his articles since then, on Penn Station, sound, the New York Public Library, the World Trade Center, transit and infrastructure, redevelopment after Hurricane Sandy, as well as on Syrian