Amy Lyford is the Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is the author of Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France and Isamu Noguchi's Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930-1950.
'Amy Lyford has shaped a plethora of archival information into a story of Dorothea Tanning’s life and works. Exquisite Dreams is a highly readable page turner that engages fully with Tanning’s canny critiques of gender and sexuality and illuminates the complexities of Tanning’s life showing Tanning to be one of the most intriguing artists of the twentieth century.' – Jennifer Shaw, Sonoma State University, author of Exist Otherwise