Ferrara earned her doctorate from the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2026. Her research and teaching span the fields of modern and contemporary art history, museum studies, and performance studies. She investigates global histories of performance and installation art, and her work considers how histories of exhibition, collection, and conservation shape legacies of radical postwar art-making. Ferrara was a Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles from 2023-2026, and from 2016-2018, she was Curatorial Assistant, Collections, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Lidia holds a MA in Art History from UCLA and a BA in Art History and French from Barnard College.