Christopher Zara

Christopher Zara is a New York City-based author and journalist who writes about business, tech, media, culture, and theater. He is a senior editor at Fast Company magazine, where he runs the news desk. Before that, he was a deputy editor at International Business Times, a theater critic for Newsweek, and managing editor for the performing arts newspaper Show Business Weekly. Zara grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and started writing for community theater in Orlando, Florida, in the 1990s. He later turned to journalism and relocated to New York City. His movie credits as writer include the feature documentary Average Community, which chronicles the local punk-rock scene of 1980s New Jersey. The movie took home the Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary from the 2009 CMJ Film Festival. Zara's first book, Tortured Artists, was published in 2012 by Adams Media (now an imprint of Simon & Schuster) and is described as a loving but irreverent examination of the relationship between creativity and pain. It includes short profiles of famous artists, musicians, writers, and poets, highlighting stories about how their work was fueled by struggle and conflict. Zara's debut memoir, Uneducated (Little, Brown and Company, 2023), is a personal exploration of the diploma divide that explores the value of college and confronts the stigma of being degreeless in a 21st-century knowledge economy. The book documents Zara's struggles as a student with behavioral difficulties in the New Jersey public school system and later his efforts to assimilate as a high school dropout in the pedigree-obsessed world of New York media.