Olivia Greenberg
MFA ’26 Photography
a bridge both crossed and burning is an exploration of the deepest parts of my mind. Rooted in the recovery of repressed memories of sexual assault, it is an attempt to heal and move on. By juxtaposing the prickly fear of being touched with the brilliant potency of desire, I capture the complex ways in which we share ourselves in relationships.
As I cope with flashes of my past, I manipulate the camera through extreme over and under exposure; blurring the lines between reality and memory. I have no proof of what violence my body really endured causing my memories to be disorienting or appear as shattered fragments. As I shed light on my past to confront it, it becomes blinding, and fades faster and more violently with each passing second.
I seek evidence of what he did to me. I turn my camera to my body, a sole witness, traumatized, yet bearing no marks. I expose my nude form both to confront residual effects of assault, to learn not only to accept my body, but reclaim it. While I wear the same skin as that little girl who was assaulted, I am no longer her.
I believed that escaping that relationship would be the end, but the bridge is still burning.
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Olivia Greenberg is a photographer, writer, and bookmaker from Rockaway, New Jersey. She received her BFA in fine art photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2024. She is now living in Boston, pursuing her MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, with an expected graduation of May 2026. Her work has been featured in Sidelines and Draft Magazines as well as exhibited in the Boston Young Contemporaries Exhibition.
