Olivia Furman

They/Them

furmanol@msu.edu

FacultyAfrican American and African Studies

Post-Doc/Research Associate

Biography

Olivia Furman, Ph. D. (they/them) is a Black non-binary womanist artist, educator, and researcher currently working on the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples at Michigan State University. Their work currently explores the significance of engaging culturally informed literacies of dreaming, journaling, storytelling, and the arts within conceptualizations and practice of liberatory teaching, learning, and research. Their primary mediums include multimedia and digital collage, ceramics, quilting, and the written and spoken word. Liv is also an avid gardener, skater, singer, musician, and yoga apprentice. Liv is currently a Post-Doctoral scholar in the Department of African American and African Studies, and Assistant Project Director of the Quilt Index’s Black Diaspora Quilt History Project at Michigan State University.

Courses

Fall 2023 – AAAS 404: Black Ecologies & Environmental Justice Spring 2024 – Black People & Land

University News

Afrofuturism & Quilting Exhibition: Exploring Connections Within Teaching, Learning, and Quilt Praxis
Published April 17, 2024 in College of Arts & Letters
Stitch by stitch, quilt making has played an integral role in African American history. But the storytelling embedded in the quilts themselves is more than mere tradition.In the Afrofuturism &…Read now »