Margot Mifflin is an author who has written for The New York Times, ARTnews, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Elle Magazine,The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. Mifflin holds an M.A. in journalism from New York University and a B.A. in English from Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she was friends with Barack Obama, an experience she has written about for The New Yorker and The New York Times. In 1982 she was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study the role of dreams in creativity.