Cyrena Touros

Cyrena Touros is a freelance culture critic and reporter based in South Florida. She is a frequent guest critic and contributor for NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour and New Music Friday podcasts, and her writing has been published in Elle Magazine, Vox, Harper's Bazaar, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others.

Touros most recently worked at NPR as an editor for its flagship newsmagazine program, All Things Considered, and before that, as an editor for NPR Music, where she worked on interviews with artists like Fiona Apple, Moses Sumney, and Angelica Garcia, commissioned critical essays on Shakira and Bad Bunny, and curated an end-of-year list of songs about climate anxiety. She is perhaps best known for arguing that Lorde is one of the most important musicians of the 21st century in NPR's Turning the Tables series — her first published feature, which she wrote as a 22-year-old intern.

Touros graduated from Georgetown University with a B.A. in American Musical Culture, where she cultivated an academic interest in performance studies while moonlighting as an intern and events assistant for the 9:30 Club and I.M.P. Presents. [Copyright 2025 NPR]