Maureen Dowd is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times. She has worked for the Times since 1983, when she joined as a metropolitan reporter. In 1999, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Dowd was born in Washington, D.C, the youngest of five children, where her father (who was born in County Clare in Ireland) worked as a Washington D.C. police inspector.In 1973, Dowd received a B.A. in English from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. She began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for the Washington Star where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature writer. When the newspaper closed in 1981, she went to work at Time magazine. In 1983, she joined The New York Times, initially as a metropolitan reporter. She began serving as correspondent in The Times Washington bureau in 1986.In 1991, Dowd received a Breakthrough Award from Columbia University. In 1992, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting, and in 1994 she won a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications.

In 1995, Dowd became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page, replacing Anna Quindlen, who left to become a full-time novelist. Dowd was named a Woman of the Year by Glamour magazine in 1996. She was the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary.In 2000, she won The Damon Runyon Award for outstanding contributions to journalism. In 2005, she was the first Mary Alice Davis Lectureship speaker sponsored by the School of Journalism and the Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin.