Olivia Armandroff

Olivia Armandroff is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art History and a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. She works on twentieth-century American art, with research interests that include the proliferation of imagery through printed materials, instances of collaborative production, and questions of space and the built environment. She holds a B.A. in the History of Art and History from Yale University and an M.A. in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program. 
 
Her dissertation, titled “Volcanic Matter: Land Formation and Artistic Creation,” examines how Hawai‘i’s volcanoes, as geological process, material trace, and Indigenous cosmology, have animated diverse artistic engagements with land and landscape from the islands’ pre-contact era to the present day. The chapters comprise a visual ecology oriented around five of volcanoes’ natural states: molten lava, fire, hardened Earth, loose stones or pohaku, and petroglyph inscriptions or ki‘i pohaku. Artists’ responses to these dynamic sites expand canonical definitions of landscape art and American art, evidencing intersections between Indigenous lifeways and histories of science, tourism, and colonialism. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Amon Carter Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Decorative Arts Trust as well as grants from the Center for Transpacific Studies, the Visual Studies Research Institute, and the Department of Art History at USC.
 
She has published in Winterthur Portfolio, Journal of Design History, Italian Modern Art, and Woman’s Art Journal and has held positions at the Delaware Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. In 2023, she was selected as a recipient of the Mentored Teaching Fellowship at USC based upon her record as a teaching assistant and taught a course of her own design, Myths, Arts, Realities: Visual Culture in California, 1849 to the Present.

• BA Yale University, 5/2017
• MA Univ Delaware