Olivia “Livvy” Dunne’s life is made by rules. During a floor routine, the gymnast must include three different saltos, with at least one being a double backflip. There must be dance. On bars, a 360-degree turn is required, and a dismount is mandatory. Everything is judged, including aesthetics, where still more rules apply (hair in a pony, bun, or braid; no special shoes, but also no bare feet; nails must be short).
Dunne, 23, has followed all these rules superbly to some of the higher levels of the sport, competing on Louisiana State University’s gymnastics team for her five-year university career, which included the team’s National Championship in 2024. One rule, though, has had perhaps more influence over Dunne’s life than any other: a 2021 Supreme Court decision led the NCAA (the governing body of college sports) to change its rules on students benefiting from their name, image and likeness (NIL). Suddenly, college athletes could earn. And as of the writing of this article, Livvy Dunne is queen bee.
“I just want to create something big.”
She has reportedly earned more than any other college athlete in the world, a sum that has been reported to be $4 million a year. With her 5.3 million Instagram followers, and 8 million followers on TikTok, she can earn upwards of $500,000 for a single post. She’s worked with fashion brands like Nautica, Vuori, and American Eagle, and has been featured as a swimsuit model in Sports Illustrated three times (once on the cover) and will again next year.
“I just want to create something big,” Dunne says. We’re sitting in an elegant cafe and boutique in New York’s West Village, near where Dunne has recently purchased an apartment (you can get a tour on her Insta). She buys her olive oil here. We’re joined by her mom, Kat Dunne, whom Olivia calls a momager, and “A huge part of my life. I talk to her every single day.” Her older sister, Julianna “Julz” Dunne, helps create content and manage Olivia’s brand. Dad is a lawyer and doesn’t involve himself much with her business. “He just wants to be Dad,” she says.
So why New York? “I grew up in New Jersey,” she says. “And it’s a great place to be when you’re young in your twenties.” She likes local It-Must-Be-Nice-to-Be-a-West Village-Girl spots like Little Ruby’s, and goes to downtown clubs with her influencer pal Lily Chee. She splits her time between New York and Jupiter, Florida, where her boyfriend, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes, has a house (the pair met at LSU and have been dating since 2023). “I get what it takes to be great at what you do, and he’s one of the best. So we have a mutual respect.” He lets her know when her “Jersey is coming out,” in moments of candor. “Most people in Louisiana tiptoe around things and then be nice to your face and then say something behind your back. Whereas, if I feel a certain way, I will just say it,” she says.
I receive a small dose of this when I refer to her as an influencer, a term she does not readily accept. So what is she, then? “A former athlete, and honestly, right now: model,” she says. Understandable. While Dunne is no longer competing, the title of “gymnast” is fairly hard-wired into her self-description. “I was rated 10 at age 10,” she says. That’s the highest level one can attain; it meant she was competing against adults. She was recruited by LSU as a high school freshman. “I started getting recruiting letters when I was 10,” she says. (Rules have since changed, and candidates must be older.)
She was homeschooled from 7th grade to accommodate 8 hours of training every day and regular week-long trips to the National Training Center in Texas. While she missed out on things like “prom and field trips,” her sister “showed me how to act like a normal human being,” she says. She was lightning-focused on her sport. And she saw some advantages, “Public school kids can be mean,” she says.
Elite athletics can be as demanding mentally as they are physically, especially gymnastics (the “yips” or the “twisties” have famously, and savagely, disrupted many a gymnastics career), which meant Dunne spoke every day with her aunt, a mindset coach. “It’s a lot mentally, getting your body to do what it needs to do every day,” she says. “She taught me that you are more than your sport.”
Dunne was an Olympic hopeful until 2018, when she was diagnosed with osteochondritis dissecans, where the blood supply to the bone is cut off beneath cartilage. Not that this hurt her ascent. Arriving at LSU in the summer of 2020, Dunne continued to amass followers, and soon, sponsors with the NIL rule change— which opened a spigot of deals.
Still, Dunne does have some concerns. “A recruit that hasn’t even touched foot on a campus yet gets paid $12 million by a booster. That’s not an NIL deal, that’s being paid to play,” she says. Which leads to her more personal, and ironic, concern: “That would never, that would never happen with any women’s sport.”
(Gilles Bensimon)
As a response, Dunne has made The Livvy Fund. “It’s to help get NIL deals for the female student athletes,” she says. “The brands I work with put money into a fund, and my sister will pair them up with a female student athlete who goes to LSU who wants to work.”
As brand deals have brought Dunne more attention, they’ve also expanded her ambition. Asked what she’s been reading of late, she lands a pretty solid joke: “Contracts.” But seriously, she’s reading scripts, working with an acting coach; she loves “old school” romcoms like Notting Hill, and with her athletic background, “I can do cool action things as well.” In fact, she’s been drawing from her gymnastics experience: Competing, she would “turn off my brain and just let my body do what it knows how to do.” Her acting coach tells her it’s comparable to performance: “Just to not think about what you’re saying,” and “really feel what you’re doing. ”
Dunne is a mind at constant work, always creating, refining, and pushing her vision forward. She’s had creative input—from her routines to her leotards—since childhood, and that continues in her roles with brands. “You could get a message at 1:30 a.m., ‘I have an idea: what if we do it like this?” says her mom. “Even with the brands, an hour before something’s gonna go up, she’s like, ‘Wait, I have a better idea!” The brands, especially the larger ones, don’t often listen. So how does Livvy deal with that? “Short memory. That comes with sports, too.
“I love the red carpet. I love the glitz and glam of it.”
Fact is, at this point, she’s an old pro at both. “My mom put a phone in my hand when I was six, because I was so young, and I was training with the older girls.” Kat says they were always a tech-forward family. “My kids grew up with technology as a tool. I was like: ‘You. Here. Technology. Create something.’” Her social media rule for Livvy, especially during quarantine, is that if she was scrolling, she had to be making something. “Be the one creating,” Livvy says. “And I am so thankful for that, because it can be easy to sit there and hide behind a screen.”
Whatever it is she’s making, it’s working. Over the summer, when many influencers were attending “film festivals in the South of France” (her words), she was at the College World Series of baseball, Miller Lite in hand. She insists that’s just where she wanted to be, “Not waiting for the camera to pan to me.” She argues that this was a moment of the ever-so-elusive authenticity that all content creators seek. “I love the red carpet. I love the glitz and glam of it. There’s no denying that. You don’t really think a Taylor Swift that’s in the spotlight doesn’t actually enjoy it? She does.”
Dunne built her following from an actual talent, skill and hard work. A search for authenticity can be limited because there’s a there, there. You can see it, slamming into mats, competing at the highest levels for her entire life. Now that gymnastics is done, it will be time to find Dunne.
“I created something larger than sport,” she says. She’s captured our attention, and she’s holding it, which is saying something in these times. By sharing more than a little, calculating, creating, she’s made an empire. In other words, she is this moment; she is the star we deserve.
