Rate My Professor April Eisman

April Eisman is Professor of Art and Visual Culture, specializing in contemporary art history, in the College of Design at Iowa State University of Science and Technology. She holds a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh (2007), an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and a BA in English and Art History from Lawrence University. Eisman joined Iowa State University as Assistant Professor in 2007, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013, and to Professor in 2024. Her career also includes serving as Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the Institut für Kunst- und Musikwissenschaft, Technische Universität Dresden (2023-2024), and co-curating the exhibition “Angela Hampel: Das Künstlerische Werk / The Artistic Work” at Städtische Galerie Dresden (2021-2022). Earlier roles encompass curatorial internships at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Eisman’s research focuses on East German art and its reception in contexts of post-socialism, feminism, Marxism, and contemporary art theory. She is the author of the monograph Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany (Camden House, 2018), editor of Kunst in der DDR – 30 Jahre danach (V & R unipress, 2021), and author of the exhibition catalog Angela Hampel – Das künstlerische Werk / The Artistic Work (Kerber Verlag, 2022), with a forthcoming book Feminist Painting and Experimental Art in East Germany: The Case of Angela Hampel (Camden House, 2026). She has published more than thirty journal articles and book chapters, including “East German Art & the Permeability of the Berlin Wall” (German Studies Review, 2015), “Whose East German Art is This? The Politics of Reception After 1989” (Imaginations, 2017), and “Experimental Art in Service to (East German) Society: Angela Hampel and Steffen Fischer’s Fluß-Uferzone, 1988” (Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, 2024). Eisman has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award (2023-2024) to research the impact of reunification on East German artists and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2018) for work on artist Angela Hampel. She maintains an active curatorial and scholarly presence in the United States and Germany.