The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art

Joan Kron, a prize-winning journalist and filmmaker, was born and raised in New York City. She is a graduate in costume design of the Yale Drama School (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale) and worked at NBC-TV on “Howdy Doody” and other shows before moving to Philadelphia. There, as a founder and head of the Arts Council of the YM/YWHA in the 1960s, she produced a series of ground-breaking Pop Art exhibitions.  

In her early forties, she embarked on a career in journalism, writing, in quick succession, for Philadelphia magazine, New York magazine, and the New York Times, where she was the chief reporter in the newly created Home Section. She then joined the Wall Street Journal, where she was a front-page reporter, initiating the fashion beat. She served as editor-in-chief of Avenue magazine for four years, before joining Conde Nast’s beauty magazine, Allure, where, as contributing editor-at-large for 25 years, she created the plastic-surgery beat. She went on to produce and direct the prize-winning documentary film “Take My Nose Please! Comediennes and Plastic Surgery.”

She is the author of “High-Tech: the Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home” with Suzanne Slesin (Clarkson Potter, 1978); “Home-Psych: the Social Psychology of Home and Decoration” (Clarkson Potter, 1983); Ms. Faux Pas: a Non-Guide to Glitterati Manners” (Parvenu,1988)); and “Lift: Wanting, Fearing, and Having a Face-Lift “(Viking, 1998). Now 98, she lives in Miami, Florida. She is at work on her second film, “Weapon of Beauty: The Cloak and Dagger History of Botox.”