Hannah Edgar

Hannah Edgar

Music critic for The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Reader

Hannah Edgar is a Chicago-based music writer, editor, researcher, and radio producer. They write music criticism for The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Reader, and regularly contribute to ARTnews, The University of Chicago Magazine, and the experimental music newsletter Tone Glow.

Previously, Edgar served as assistant digital editor at Chicago magazine and as a contributing writer and editor at The Classical Review, an online publication covering classical music in seven states and metro areas. They were a 2018 Rubin Institute Fellow, working alongside professional and rising critics in a four-day intensive music criticism program, and a 2019 Bang on a Can Media Fellow, where they covered Loud Weekend for WNYC’s New Sounds.

In radio, Edgar has produced programs for Sound Opinions, the weekly music criticism show hosted by Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, and the WBEZ culture/talk podcast Nerdette. In 2015, they served as the inaugural Andrew Patner Fellow at 98.7 WFMT, for whom they still write as a freelancer.

As a program book annotator, Edgar writes lead stories for Fanfare, the program book magazine of the Cincinnati Symphony. During the 2017–18 New York Philharmonic season, they wrote and researched “The History in This Program” features for the Philharmonic’s subscription program books.

Edgar is currently a part-time library science student at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign’s iSchool, with an intended focus in archives and special collections. While an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, Edgar’s bachelor’s thesis—on the work and legacy of Chicago-based arts critic Claudia Cassidy—was the recipient of the Leonard B. Meyer Prize and accepted for publication in the 2018 edition of the Chicago Studies Annual.