Christine Dolen
In the history of South Florida theater since 1979, it’s hard to find a voice that has projected as resoundingly as Christine Dolen’s. During her four and a half decades as a theater critic and journalist — mostly for the Miami Herald but recently for Artburst Miami — the enormously talented Christine Dolen played an offstage role as enduring and definitive as any in the tri-county theater community. A contributor to the Sun Sentinel for three years, Christine was married for 36 years to former Sentinel arts and features editor John Dolen. Christine is estimated to have reviewed 3,000 regional productions, not to mention more than 1,000 Broadway and off-Broadway shows. American Theatre Magazine recognized her as one of the country’s 12 most influential theater critics. Relentlessly committed to the arts, in 2023 Christine was honored with the George Abbott Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts from the Carbonell Awards, an annual award that honors excellence in resident professional theater and the arts. In its 46 years, the only two-time recipients of the award have been Christine and Jack Zink, the late Sun Sentinel theater critic and Carbonell Awards founder. When Christine accepted the Abbott award, she said, “Along with Jack Zink and others, I got to tell the story of South Florida’s theatrical evolution. Show by show, story by story and review by review, we helped theater-loving audiences understand the region’s evolution.”