Nick Lemann is Henry R. Luce Professor and Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University.

A native of New Orleans, Lemann began his journalism career as a 17 year-old writer for an alternative weekly newspaper there, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he concentrated in American History and Literature and was President of the Harvard Crimson.

After graduation, Lemann worked at The Washington Monthly as an associate editor and then managing editor; at Texas Monthly, as an associate editor and then executive editor; at The Washington Post, as a member of the national staff; at The Atlantic Monthly, as national correspondent; and at The New Yorker, as staff writer and then Washington Correspondent. On September 1, 2003, he became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Lemann has published four books, most recently The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes; and The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT. He is now at work on a book about the Reconstruction period in American history. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Slate, and American Heritage; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., Frontline, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities. He serves on the boards of directors of the Authors Guild, the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Society of American Historians, and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities.