Dr. Ferris Olin, Distinguished Professor Emerita, is an art historian, curator, women’s and gender studies scholar, and librarian. In her more than four decades at Rutgers University, she co-founded and co-directed the Rutgers Institute for Women in the Arts and The Feminist Art Project. Olin also established the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists at Rutgers as well as the Margery Somers Foster Center, a research center focused on documenting women’s leadership in the public arena collecting primary sources and creating scholarly resources using emerging technologies; served as Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women; and earlier, Director of the Art Library.  In addition at Rutgers, she worked for 25 years as the curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series, the oldest exhibition series in the US showing work by emerging and established contemporary women artists. She co-created the Women Artists Archive National Directory (WAAND), a digital directory of archives where the papers of women artists active in the US since 1945 are located, funded by the Getty Foundation.

Olin has served on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations and was Vice- President of the College Art Association and Treasurer of the Women’s Project of New Jersey. She is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and the College Art Association Committee Distinguished Feminist Award.