Brandy McDonnell, an award-winning journalist and lifelong Oklahoman, celebrated her 25th year as a professional journalist in 2024, and in 2025 marked her 23rd anniversary as a features writer for The Oklahoman and Oklahoman.com, part of the USA TODAY Network. She started as a journalist in seventh grade, submitting stories to her local weekly newspaper, The Lindsay News. She received her journalism degree with honors from Oklahoma State University in 1999, worked at two small Oklahoma daily newspapers and joined the newsroom at the statewide newspaper, The Oklahoman, in 2002. Often called by her initials, “BAM,” McDonnell shifted in 2007 to The Oklahoman’s arts and entertainment beat. She received the Oklahoma Governor's Arts Award for Media in the Arts in 2015, an Oklahoma Film & TV Icon Award from the deadCenter Film Festival in 2020, and the regional Society of Professional Journalists’ First Amendment Awards prize for “Defending the Disadvantaged” in 2021. A Tomatometer-approved critic for RottenTomatoes.com, she is a founding member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle and a longtime member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, for which she writes The Week in Women news blog.

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