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 American modernism, Asian calligraphy, and Northwest Coast formline, her dissertation reconsiders the abstract line not as a pure form but as a process conditioned by artistic and spiritual traditions from multiple cultures and places. By tracking this proposition through the Cold War and the simultaneous rise of the artistic global contemporary and the anti-globalization movement, 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