Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian and writer. 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. Since then, she has written extensively about the effects of partisan ideologies upon art history, museums, public art, and liberal arts education. In 2020 she was interviewed for the Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, and in 2021 was a guest on William Shatner’s talk show I Don’t Understand, discussing what makes something art.  www.juliafriedman.org