Olivia Dill

Olivia Dill (she/her) is the Assistant Curator in the department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She comes to the BMA from the Morgan Library & Museum where she served as the Moore Curatorial Fellow in the Drawings and Prints Department for one year. As a fellow she curated two rotations from the permanent collection, one highlighting nineteenth-century oil sketches, and the other nineteenth-century French portrait drawings. Olivia also surveyed and contributed novel research on the Morgan’s sizeable holdings of early modern natural history drawings, culminating in a graduate seminar, Drawing Nature 1500–1900, which she co-organized. Olivia recently received her PhD in Art History from Northwestern University. Her dissertation, Insects “Too Beautiful to be Described:” Maria Sibylla Merian and the Matter of Iridescence in the Colonial Dutch Atlantic, applied technical and archival art historical methodologies to characterize the materials and techniques that artists in the Netherlands, England, and Germany used to represent iridescence in insects from the Americas over the long seventeenth century. Centered around German-born, artist-naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian’s prints and drawings of insects from the Dutch colony of Suriname, the project offered a new reading of the relationship between Merian’s work and the project of Dutch empire. Olivia also holds a B.A. in Art History and in Physics from the University of California Berkeley.

Olivia’s prior experience includes the two-year interdisciplinary Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, supervised jointly between the departments of drawings and prints, scientific research, and paper conservation. In that role, she co-curated two rotations of works on paper from the permanent collection and conducted art historical and scientific analysis of the materials used by artists in natural history drawings and hand-colored prints. One aspect of that research, a reattribution and technical analysis of the use of smalt in a drawing by Pieter Holsteyn II depicting a shimmering Brazilian blue beetle was published in the fall, 2025 issue of the journal Master Drawings, and was awarded the 2025 Ricciardi Prize honoring the best submission by a scholar under 40. Olivia has also held a one-year fellowship in the Prints and Drawings Department at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), has contributed to exhibitions at the AIC, the Newberry Library, and the Block Museum of Art, and was a central contributor to digitization projects for the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and UC Berkeley Libraries.