Anna Felicity Friedman

Interdisciplinary scholar Anna Felicity Friedman has been researching the history of tattooing for over 20 years, when, as a high school student, she wandered into the Peabody (now Peabody Essex) Museum's library seeking to look at rare books that discussed sailor tattoos. She has been collecting tattoos on her own body since 1990. Her two blogs, Tattoo History Daily and Tattoo History Occasionally, can be accessed through the hub tattoohistorian.com. Tattoo History Daily can be followed on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr. She is currently the curatorial director for a new traveling exhibition in development, TATTOO: Ancient Myths, Modern Meanings (tattootheexhibition.com) and recently launched a new foundation, the Center for Tattoo History and Culture (centerfortattoo.org). She served as the curator of the tattoo material in the Freaks and Flash exhibition (2009) at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. Several books are currently in the works, and her newest, World Atlas of Tattoos (Thames & Hudson and Yale University Press) just came out in Fall 2015. She writes occasional articles for magazines such as Things and Ink, Total Tattoo, and Tattoo Culture Magazine.

Although studying the history of tattooing and body art is a particular passion for her, she also has spent considerable time lecturing and publishing on other topics in visual culture including contemporary performance art (she also occasionally performs), rare books, and celestial cartography. For 10 years she taught a variety of classes at the university level at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in diverse fields including art history, liberal arts, social sciences, visual and critical studies, performance art, and freshman core classes (that combine literature, art, and film studies). For many years she worked as the assistant curator in the History of Astronomy department at Chicago's Adler Planetarium, and she has filled many other roles in museums (she also worked at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and the Field Museum) and as an independent curator. She also plays bass and sings in several rock bands.