Julia Friedman is an art historian, critic, and curator based in Orange County. She began her art historical studies at the Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, where she grew up. In 2005 she received a Ph.D. in Art History from Brown University, and has since researched and taught in the U.S., U.K., and Japan. Her trans-disciplinary work on European Modernism, Russian emigration, and book art resulted in the illustrated monograph Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art, published by Northwestern University Press in 2011. In 2016 she completed a project based on the digital writings of Dave Hickey, editing Dust Bunnies and Wasted Words—two pendant volumes of the critic’s Facebook exchanges. She has been a regular contributor to Artforum, the Huffington Post, and the New Criterion. Her current research explores the tragicomic genesis of Wayne Thiebaud’s clown paintings. www.juliafriedman.net