Dana Shawn Stevens (born June 30, 1966)^{[citation needed]} is an American film critic who writes for Slate.^[1] She is also a cohost of the magazine's weekly cultural podcast, the Culture Gabfest.^[2] She is the author of a 2022 book about Buster Keaton and the 20th century titled Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century.^[3][4][5]

Stevens grew up in Scarsdale, New York;^[6] and San Antonio, Texas.^[7][8] She graduated from Vassar College and attained a doctorate in comparative literature from UC Berkeley in 2001 with a dissertation on Fernando Pessoa: A Local Habitation and a Name: Heteronymy and Nationalism in the works of Fernando Pessoa.

She joined Slate in mid-2003, writing the magazine's Surfergirl column on television and pop-culture.^[9] Before joining Slate she wrote under the pseudonym "Liz Penn" on her own (now-defunct) website/blog called the High Sign.^[6] She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, Bookforum, and The Atlantic^[9] and has appeared on several occasions on Charlie Rose and The Brian Lehrer Show. She is a regular on Slate's Culture Gabfest.^[10]

Stevens has described herself as "an atheist raised in culturally Christian milieu".^[11] She lives in Brooklyn, New York.^[9]