Sterritt began his career as a film critic at
Boston After Dark (now the
Boston Phoenix)where he was Chief Editor. He then moved to
The Christian Science Monitor, where he worked as the newspaper's Film Critic and Special Correspondent. During his tenure at the Monitor, Sterritt held a number of additional appointments. From 1978-1980 he was the Film Critic for
All Things Considered, on
National Public Radio. From 1969 to 1973, he was the Boston Theater Critic for
Variety, and he sat on the selection committee for the
New York Film Festival from 1988 to 1992. Between 1994 and 2002 he was Senior Critic at the National Critics Institute of the
Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, and he served as the video critic for
Islands magazine from 2000-2003. From 2005-2007 he was Programming Associate at the Makor/Steinhardt Center of the
92nd Street Y. He writes regularly for Cineaste magazine. Sterritt's writings on film and film culture have also appeared in
MovieMaker in an article about
independent film,
Senses of Cinema in an article about Iranian filmmaker
Abbas Kiarostami,
Cinéaste in an article about French filmmaker
Alain Renais, and
Beliefnet in an article about
Steven Spielberg's
War of the Worlds. In 1998 Sterritt edited a book of interviews and conversations with Godard by critics, scholars, and journalists, from the 1960s to the 1990s, illuminating the filmmaker's life, work, and ideas. According to Sterritt, "Scorsese has worshiped at two altars throughout his adult life: the altar of Christianity and the altar of cinema." In 2004
CNN quoted Sterritt about Gibson's controversial film, which some people protested due its troubling portrayal of Jews, as saying the film "certainly leaves the door open for anybody who comes in already contaminated with the germs of
anti-Semitism. This will feed those germs." From 1999-2015 Sterritt was the Co-Chair, with
William Luhr, of the
Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation. He is currently on the Film Studies Faculty at
Columbia University's Graduate Film Division, and Adjunct Faculty at the
Maryland Institute College of Art in the Department of Language, Literature and Culture and the Department of
Art History. He is also Distinguished Visiting Faculty in the Goldring Arts Journalism Program at the
S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at
Syracuse University, and Professor Emeritus of Theater and Film at
Long Island University, where he taught from 1993 to 2005, obtaining tenure in 1998. ==Personal life==