Matthew James Holman is a writer and academic, based in London.
I write on literature and the visual arts, with a focus on conflict, diplomacy, democracy, and the avant-garde. I completed a PhD in American cultural history at University College London, and have held fellowships at Yale University, the Smithsonian, the Courtauld Institute (Terra Foundation for American Art Fellow), the Paul Mellon Centre, and the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin (Leverhulme Trust).
My first book, Frank O’Hara and MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator (Bloomsbury), which frames O’Hara as a key figure who shaped postwar American art’s global circulation and cultural diplomacy, is out now. I have written for major exhibitions and artist publications, including for the catalogue of Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (September 2026), and contributed essays on artists including Frank Auerbach, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Christopher Le Brun, and Françoise Gilot, as well as Megan Rooney, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Noah Beyene, and Theodore Ereira-Guyer. I am currently working on a group biography of Black Mountain College.
My art and literary criticism appears regularly in The Art Newspaper (where I am Commissioning Editor), as well as Apollo, Frieze, Financial Times, Literary Review, Jacobin, New Left Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere.
I am Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Hertfordshire and teach transatlantic art history at the Courtauld. My academic work—on subjects ranging from New Deal theatre to environmental poetics and Abstract Expressionism—has appeared in journals including Oxford Art Journal, Essays and Studies, Critical Quarterly, and The Journal of Modern Literature.
For enquiries, please email me at matthew.james.holman@gmail.com.
