Olivia is a New York-based writer, editor, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the intersection of labor, race, and incarceration. Olivia is a PhD candidate in Sociology at CUNY’s Graduate Center, where she recently finished researching and editing Practical Radicals, a book on power and strategy for the oppressed. She is an editor and events manager for OR Books, a progressive and alternative publishing company.
Olivia is also a producer for a boutique documentary film company, Human Pictures and a Sundance Institute Documentary Filmmaker Grant recipient. She can shoot and edit in 16mm moving image, film to film on her Bolex.
Olivia’s writing has been featured in The Nation, Jacobin, The Baffler, ArtNews, The Marshall Project, NY Daily News, Literary Hub, The Appeal, JSTOR, Documented, and more.
She has guest lectured at universities, been featured on the radio, and testified for the New York State Wage Board on behalf of farm laborers’ rights, and for the Marin County Health Commission on water restrictions in California’s prisons.
She is an editor for Empowerment Avenue and Wall City, a news publication made and distributed in San Quentin Prison.
Olivia directed and produced CINE HIDALGO, an award-winning short film about Mexico’s first mobile cinema. Among many others, Olivia is worked on:
IGUALADA premiered at Sundance 2024, about Francia Marquez, an Indigenous land rights activist and the first black woman to run for President in Colombia
WELCOME TO FEAR CITY winner of over 20 film festival awards, about the community policing initiative ‘Copwatch,’ police brutality, and accountability (or lack thereof) in NYC
SILENT AGITATOR (in production) about the origins of labor rights and organizing for and among farmworkers that manifest in collective organizing spaces today
Email her: olivia.m.heffernan at gmail.com