Audrey Storm

Audrey Storm is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History. She studies twentieth-century American art and visual culture with a focus on the transnational American West. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Through Line: Painting Abstraction in the Transpacific Northwest” reorients the geography of Abstract Expressionism and its afterlives towards the West Coast, East Asia, and Native North America. Triangulating Western gestural abstraction, Asian calligraphy, and Northwest Coast formline, her dissertation reconsiders the abstract line through the historic belief that the slow and dedicated practice of line-based processes enacts cultural transmission. By tracking this proposition through the Cold War and the contentious rise of globalization, she shows how abstraction’s connective ability was alternately adapted and rebutted in the long twentieth century.

For the 2024-2025 academic year, she is serving as the Morgan-Menil Predoctoral Fellow at the Morgan Library in New York City and the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas and is also supported by a Teresa Wilson Endowed Fellowship and a Huntington Library Research Fellowship. Her research has also been supported by the Department of Art History, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and the Visual Studies Research Institute at USC.

Prior to joining the department, she held internships at Bonhams, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Asian American Arts Alliance. She also was a studio assistant for the artist Titus Kaphar. She holds a BA from Yale University in History of Art and Economics, where her undergraduate thesis won the Vincent D. Andrus Memorial Prize. [arstorm@usc.edu]

• BA Yale University, 5/2018