Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, installation, and writing. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department (Photography) at California State University, Los Angeles. His intersectional research and interdisciplinary projects conceptually focus on queerness, notions of passing, visualizing the performativity of gender, explorations in appropriation, performative interactions with the public as a collaborator, and visualizing other representations of the AIDS pandemic while referencing historical movements in gender, racial and feminist histories. He curated the exhibition, The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He is a part of the monograph Confronting the Abject, named from his research-themed class that he co-taught with Catherine Opie at SAIC. His forthcoming publication, Papi, archives the AIDS pandemic through his queer family in Chicago during the 1980s. He also just finished his short documentary film, LYNDALE, exploring toxic masculinity, cyclical familial trauma and queerness, currently distributed by Video Data Bank (VDB). ​​​​​​​Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured, and exhibited his works internationally and nationally.