OLIVIA LEVINS HOLDEN (She/They) is a queer, mixed Boricua muralist, organizer, artist, and educator living on Dakota homeland, Mni Sota Makoce, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Olivia’s work explores many ways that the arts can transform and support movements, tell stories, plant seeds, and combat toxic narratives. They center processes of community involvement and collective design, drawing from conversations and people’s history to create collaborative murals and public art, believing that the process is as essential as the final artwork. Since 2009, they have created and led the creation of murals in Minneapolis, California, and Puerto Rico, including Minneapolis murals Waves of Change/Oleadas de Cambio (2015), Defend, Nurture, Grown Phillips (2019), Wiidookodaadiwag/They Help Each Other (2019), and Ritmos y Raices de Resistencia (2021). With her artist collective, Studio Thalo, Olivia creates live-painted mobile murals to reflect conversations and events.

Olivia  is a 2022 McKnight Fellow for Community Engaged Artists, and was a 2015 recipient of the Forecast Public Art project grant and has served as a facilitator and mentor for project-based learning through programs such as Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio (CLUES), Latinx Muralism Apprenticeship, Studio 400, and is a founding member of the Creatives After Curfew collective.  She serves as the Art of Radical Collaboration (ARC) Manager at Hope Community, Inc where she has trained artists and led community murals with youth and adults through the Power of Vision (POV) Mural project since 2017 and facilitates the Transformational Creative Strategies Training (TRCSTR).  She has a BA in History from Smith College.

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