[1] In the 1970s, Acocella was a writer and editor at Random House, where she co-authored a psychology textbook that went on to be reprinted in revised editions for two decades.

[1] In the 1980s, she served as senior critic for Dance Magazine, including authoring a piece about her son's performance in The Nutcracker with the New York City Ballet.

[5] In 1997, she accompanied Mikhail Baryshnikov on his first trip back to his birthplace of Riga, Latvia since his defection and exile from the Soviet Union in 1974.

[9][5] Reviewing Twenty-Eight Artists in The New York Times, Kathryn Harrison called Acocella "knowledgeable without being a show-off, meticulous in her research and energetically conversational", and said her "typical essay thus functions as a tantalizing biographical sketch, as well as a critical study, inviting us to pursue a deeper exploration".

Acocella's New Yorker article "Cather and the Academy", which appeared in the November 27, 1995, issue, received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York and was included in the "Best American Essays" anthology of 1996.