Olivia Armandroff

In her work as a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art History and a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate, Olivia Armandroff focuses on twentieth-century American art and material culture. 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 at the University of Delaware. 

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 project expands art historical discussions of creative process into a longer story that begins with the geological processes that formed Hawai‘i and concludes with the creation of artistic objects that evoke, celebrate, and colonize this land. As new flows harden into successive layers over older ones, volcanic land is not only being made and remade but also changing shape, and representations of Hawai?i’s most active volcano, Kilauea, show artists’ attention to the ways time itself changes the landscape. Only art, as a creative act, can fully recognize the generative power, ceaseless flux, and productive range of this active land. This dissertation’s five chapters comprise a visual ecology oriented around active volcanoes’ ever-evolving states—molten lava, fire, hardened Earth, loose stones or pohaku, and petroglyph inscriptions or ki‘i pohaku—materials that also make up the new land from which the art is forged. 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.

During the 2024–25 academic year, she is serving as the George Gurney Predoctoral Fellow and a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In addition, her research has been supported by the Amon Carter Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, the Decorative Arts Trust, the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, the National Stereoscopic Association, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Yale Center for British Art as well by the Center for Transpacific Studies, the Department of Art History, the Graduate School, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and the Visual Studies Research Institute at the University of Southern California.

She has published in Winterthur Portfolio, Journal of Design History, Italian Modern Art, and Woman’s Art Journal and has held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Delaware Art Museum. In 2023, she was selected as a recipient of the Mentored Teaching Fellowship at the University of Southern California 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