Margot Mifflin writes about women’s history and the arts. She has been a contributing editor at Elle magazine and was a contributor at Entertainment Weekly throughout its first decade.
Mifflin is the author of the first cultural history of the Miss America pageant, Looking for Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood (Counterpoint Press, 2020). The book won the Popular Culture Association’s Emily Toth Award for “Best Single Work in Women’s Studies.”
She also wrote the first feminist history of women’s tattoo culture, “Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo” (Powerhouse Books, 2013). Her book “The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman” (University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, 2009) was a finalist for the Caroline Bancroft History Prize.
A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Mifflin has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, ARTnews, The New Yorker, Bookforum, The Believer, Vogue, Vice, O, The Oprah Magazine, and many other publications. She has 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.
Along with teaching in the Arts and Culture Reporting program at the Newmark School, Mifflin is a professor in the English Department at Lehman College/CUNY. She received her B.A. in English from Occidental College and her M.A. in Journalism from New York University.