Vanessa Grigoriadis


Vanessa Maia Grigoriadis is an American journalist. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone among other publications.

Background

Grigoriadis is of Greek descent and grew up in New York City. When she was younger she played classical violin and danced. Grigoriadis graduated from Wesleyan University. She also spent a year studying the sociology of religion at Harvard University.

Career

Grigoriadis is a generalist writer for The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. Her feature Power Girls reportedly inspired the MTV reality series PoweR Girls. Her work does not cover one specific topic. She has been working on and off for the New York magazine since she graduated from college. Here, she began working as an editorial assistant and eventually worked her way up to becoming a contributing editor at the age of 25. In 2003, she was a writer on the Style desk at the New York Times.

Blurred Lines

In 2014, Grigoriadis wrote a cover story on Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia student known as Mattress Girl. That story grew into Grigoriadis's first book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. Published in September 2017, the book is an exploration of the changing attitudes toward consent on college campuses across the United States. Female students have been using fresh, smart methods to fight entrenched sexism and sexual assault even as they celebrate their own sexuality as never before, and many “woke” male students are more sensitive to women’s concerns than previous generations ever were, while other men perpetuate the most cruel misogyny. Grigoriadis investigates these complexities in the book by traveling to campuses, embedding in their social whirl, and talking candidly with dozens of students, administrators, parents, and researchers, ultimately chronicling how long-standing rules of sex and power are being rewritten from scratch.

Awards and honors

Grigoriadis received the National Magazine Award in 2007 in profile writing for a profile of Karl Lagerfeld. She was nominated in 2008 for feature writing, a piece titled Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass. She was also nominated for a Mirror Award for a profile of Arianna Huffington.

Books