Beandrea July (@beandreadotcom) is a Los Angeles-based independent film critic, podcast host, and film programmer. Originally from Dayton, Ohio, her cinematic comfort food is Sidney Poitier’s 1980s dance flick Fast Forward. In 2025, she released her independent podcast Annotations with Beandrea July, the podcast that thinks critically about criticism, for which she received a grant from the foundation Critical Minded to host, write and produce. Her writing in The New York Times on women aged 50+ in film has helped secure millions in financing for projects featuring this demographic. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire and Time, and has been featured on NPR. She joined the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 2020. As a 2024 Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard, she researched early Black film criticism. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and got her start covering public education in Philadelphia.