Olivia is a New York-based writer, editor, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the intersection of labor, race, and incarceration. She is a director at OR Books, a progressive and alternative publishing company. Olivia is a PhD candidate in Sociology at CUNY’s Graduate Center and edited Practical Radicals, a book on power and strategy for the oppressed.
Olivia is also a producer for a 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 Baffler, The Nation, Jacobin, 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.
Olivia directed and produced CINE HIDALGO, an award-winning short film about Mexico’s first mobile cinema. Among many others, Olivia has 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
AMERICAN AGITATORS 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