About

Olivia is a North Carolina–based artist and designer working with flowers and living materials across installation, set design, and experiential design, under the creative practice To Live in Color. Her work lives on the belief that beauty is in the belonging.

Her artistry began during the 2020 protests with Giving Black Women Their Flowers, a community initiative delivering floral arrangements to Black women across Charlotte that earned her the Bolt of Inspiration Award from Charlotte Is Creative. Olivia stands on the shoulders of the Newtown Florist Club, a Georgia community group whose members went from delivering arrangements to neighborhood funerals to leading climate activism.

Olivia believes design is a means of protest, bringing beauty into Black and brown communities where it has been withheld. Her floral installations are made to be dismantled, with community members taking the flowers home for themselves. In 2024 she started Garden Club, a monthly creative wellness gathering centered on home and garden, combining the art she loves to make with creating a safe space of wholeness and togetherness.

She was a featured artist in NCMA’s Art in Bloom (2021) and partnered with the Bechtler Museum (2021–2022). Most recently, a grant from Charlotte’s Urban Design Center funded Giving Us Our Flowers, a bus stop garden and mural in East Charlotte that she still tends.

Five years practicing occupational therapy taught her to design for how people move through a space and are cared for by it. She is now growing her work in public space, creating gardens and gathering places that neighbors help shape and tend.