Margot Mifflin

An author and journalist praised for writing “delicious social history” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) Margot Mifflin writes about women’s history and the arts. She wrote the first history of women’s tattoo culture, Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, and The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman, which Elmore Leonard called “a winner.” Her widely acclaimed new book, Looking For Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood, is the first cultural history of the Miss America pageant. Mifflin’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Vice, Elle, ARTnews, The Los Angeles Review of Books, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and other publications.

Mifflin is an English professor at Lehman College/CUNY and teaches arts journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She’s served as a consultant on exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Historical Society, and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and she curated the exhibition “Body Electric” at Ricco/Maresca Gallery.