John O'Brian is an art historian, writer, and curator. He is best known for his books on modern art, including Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, one of The New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” in 1986, and for his exhibitions on nuclear photography such as Camera Atomica, organized for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015. Camera Atomica was the first comprehensive exhibition on postwar nuclear photography. From 1987-2017 he taught at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2008-11) and was an associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. O’Brian has been a critic of neoconservative policies since the start of the Culture Wars in the 1980s. He is a recipient of the Thakore Award in Human Rights and Peace Studies from Simon Fraser University. Early life and education O'Brian was born in 1944 to Canadian parents in Bath, England. His father was a career officer in the Royal Air Force. His only sibling, Peter, is a filmmaker and producer. In 1969 he married Helen Worts, with whom he has three children: Melanie O’Brian, Amy O’Brian Wang, and Meghan O’Brian Braunstein. He also has four grandchildren. He was educated at New Park School in St. Andrews, Fife, and Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, before entering Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he received an Honours B.A. in Political Science and Economics in 1966. At university, he played Varsity rugby. He worked at the Toronto firm of Harris & Partners until 1974, before enrolling at York University to study art and literature. There, he began to publish art criticism, poetry, and art history. He received his PhD in art history from Harvard University under the supervision of T.J. Clark. While at Harvard, he was a research associate at the Fogg Art Museum and a proponent of “social art history,” an approach that investigates social as well as aesthetic issues. “I’m interested in how art gets produced and looked at under the social arrangements of capitalism,” he stated in an interview. His work has sometimes been targeted by neoconservative critics for mixing art and politics. O’Brian was also a member of the Pumping Station collective, a group of radical thinkers that met at the house of Gillian and Iain Boal, during the first half of the 1980s. Teaching and lectures