About


Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer and curator. She began to study art history at the Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, where she grew up. After receiving her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2005, she has researched and taught in the US, UK and Japan. In 2010 Northwestern University Press published her illustrated monograph Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art. The same year she became a regular contributor to Artforum, and in 2017 she began writing for The New Criterion. In 2015–2016 she collaborated on a project with art critic Dave Hickey, editing Dustbunnies and Wasted Words—two pendant volumes based on his Facebook exchanges. Since then, she has written essays and articles about political art, art history and pornography, the aesthetics of #MeToo, President Trump’s classical architecture executive order, George Orwell, NFTs, AI art, Johannes Vermeer, Philip Guston, and Wayne Thiebaud. In 2020 she was interviewed for the new Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed (2021) directed by Joshua Rofé, and in September 2021, she was a guest on I Don’t Understand, William Shatner’s new talk show.