Nina Metz covers film, theater and TV, in addition to her Chicago Close-Up film column, which runs every week in the Friday movies section and focuses on art house screenings and local movie news (including projects filming in town and local filmmakers). And be sure to check out On the Town every week, where you can find reviews of Chicago's smaller, scrappier theaters from Nina and contributor Kerry Reid in On the Fringe .

California born, raised in upstate New York. At Tulane University she fell hard for the city of New Orleans, where she lived and worked for nearly a decade as a news and talk radio producer. Nina has been in Chicago since 1998, and has written for the Trib since 2002.

Happiest when curled up with a copy of the New Yorker. That, or being sucked in to the tacky pleasures of Bravo's reality programming.