Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who 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 (PowerHouse Books, 1997, 2013), and The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (U. of Nebraska Press, 2009). Her book Looking For Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood (Counterpoint Press, 2021), is the first feminist cultural history of the Miss America pageant. Margot’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Vice, Elle, ARTnews, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New Yorker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Lapham’s Quarterly, Lit Hub, and other publications.

An English professor at Lehman College/CUNY, Margot also 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.