about Elisa Turner

Elisa Turner is an award-winning art critic and art journalist. In April 2025, she and over 60 honorees were inducted into the 2025 Miami-Dade County Arts Hall of Fame. Her forthcoming book drawn from personal Miami Herald archives is Miami’s Art Boom: From Local Vision to International Presence, recording how the Miami art community evolved in pivotal years 1987 to 2007. It will be published in October 2025 by University Press of Florida with generous support from the Knight Foundation. Supporting the creation of new material for this book, she received a 2024 MIA Artist Grant from Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and 2023 Ellies Creator Award from Oolite Arts. Her Miami Herald career began in 1986; from 1995 to 2007 she was the Herald’s primary art critic, with international assignments to Havana Biennial, Haiti, Venice Biennial, and Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland. Other awards: 2021 and 2020 First Place for Arts Commentary & Criticism and 2021 Second Place for Beat Reporting-Arts from South Florida Society of Professional Journalists, 2020 annual $50,000 Rabkin Prize, 2019 Leadership Award from Florida Chapter of ArtTable, and 2012 President’s Volunteer Service Award from Miami Dade College. Her writing has appeared in Artburst Miami, Art+Auction, Arte Al Dia, ARTnews, Biscayne Times, Burnaway, Delicious Line, Fine Art Globe, Hamptons Art Hub, Hyperallergic, Florida International University ArtSpeak, and Miami Rail. She has taught writing at Miami Dade College and guest-lectured at University of Miami and New World School of the Arts. As Miami correspondent for ARTnews magazine, she has written reviews, news reports, feature stories, and profiles of prominent figures in Miami's art community. She has taken part in over 20 panel discussions in Miami venues concerning the visual arts as panelist or moderator. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, U.S. Section, and ArtTable, a national organization for women in visual arts professions.