Olivia Armandroff

Olivia Armandroff is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art History and a participant in 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 the volcano, as geological process, material trace, and Indigenous cosmology, animated diverse artistic engagements with Hawaiian land and landscape from the islands’ pre-contact era to the present day. Its five chapters comprise a visual ecology oriented around the volcano’s natural forms—molten lava, hardened turf, loose basalt, petroglyphs, and burnt trees—addressing the work of settler- and tourist-artists alongside both long-established Indigenous material culture traditions and the more recent work of contemporary Native artists.

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. 

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