olivia mccall

OLIVIA MCCALL (she/her) is an art historian and curator whose work advances scholarship on artists bearing witness to the AIDS epidemic and queer experience in the 1970s–90s, with a focus on lens-based media. She is currently a second-year PhD student in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she is supported by an Areté Fellowship. She holds an MA in the History of Art, awarded with High Distinction, from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where her degree focused on the Downtown New York art scene. Her dissertation—"Transcending and Queering the Album: Nan Goldin and the Affective Archive as 'Home'"—was awarded the Director's Letter of Congratulations for excellent performance in the 2021-22 MA History of Art Dissertation.

Olivia was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies fellow in the 2023-24 cohort of the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program (ISP), under the direction of Gregg Bordowitz. Her presentation at the Critical Studies Symposium, titled "Interminable: The Affective Labor of Caretaking in/of Archives of AIDS Activism," was mentored by Ann Cvetkovich. 

From 2022-2024, Olivia was the Edith Gowin Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photography at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, where her central focus was working on a forthcoming exhibition of Peter Hujar's contact sheets that will open at the museum in May 2026, accompanied by a catalogue. Her expansive contribution to the publication, co-published with MACK Books, consists of annotations on each of the nearly 2,000 shoots that comprise Hujar's oeuvre. 

EDUCATION

Ph.D. History of Art, Bryn Mawr College (2024-)

Whitney Independent Study Program, Critical Studies (2023-24)

M.A. History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art (2022)

B.A. Art History & English, Barnard College of Columbia University (2019)