Olivija Liepa (any pronouns)

MA Archives and Public History, Spring 2024MLIS, Summer 2024

Olivija is a student of archives with a background in history and critical media studies. They enjoy looking at the archives field through a critical lens, often employing post-modern frameworks. Olivija is interested in material culture and object histories, video and performance art, and histories of subcultures and underground movements.

Olivija's MA capstone is centered on recording, analyzing, and archiving oral histories of Latvian readers of samizdat, self-published makeshift dissident texts created throughout the post-Stalinist Soviet republics. Her interest in samizdat emerged when taking History of the Book in Fall 2023, a library science elective which assessed the book as a social, cultural, and historical object.

Beyond taking part in the dual-degree program, Olivija works as an Archives Graduate Student Assistant to the Audiovisual Processing Archivist at NYU's Archival Collections Management, and is an Archives Graduate Fellow at Barnard Archives and Special Collections. Some of the cool collections she has had the opportunity to work with include the Erin Cramer feminists on SCUM tapes at Barnard, which include interviews about Valeria Solanas's shooting of Andy Warhol as a political act, and the Arleen Schloss papers, a collection housed at Fales that documents the life and work of multimedia artist, Arleen Schloss.