Isabel Wünsche

Isabel Wünsche (born 1965 in Dresden) is a German art historian and Professor of Art and Art History at Jacobs University Bremen.

Wünsche studied Art History, Classical and Christian Archeology at Humboldt University Berlin (1986–92), Moscow State University (1991–92), and Heidelberg University (1993–96).

In 1990–1991, Wünsche received grants from the Walter Kaminsky Stiftung and from Moscow State University (MGU); from 1993 to 1996 she was a recipient of a three-year dissertation grant by the Gottlieb Daimler- und Karl Benz-Stiftung.

From 1993 to 1996, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature and at the Institute of Modern Russian Culture of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

From 1993 to 2001, she lived and worked in Los Angeles.

In 1995–96, she was a Curatorial Fellow at the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionism of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In 1997, she completed her Ph.D. thesis on the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde and was awarded a PhD degree from Heidelberg University.

As Curatorial Associate at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, she worked, from 1997 to 2000, on the Catalogue Raisonné of the Galka Scheyer Blue Four Collection.

Between 1999 and 2009, she was awarded travel grants by the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), the Society of Literature and Science (SLS), and the German Research Foundation (DFG).

In 2000–2001, she curated the permanent exhibition of twentieth-century American Art at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

She also taught courses on modern art at the California Institute of Technology, Scripps College, Claremont, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 2001, Wünsche was appointed Associate Professor of Art and Art History at International University Bremen (since 2007 Jacobs University); in 2011, she was promoted to Full Professor.

Her research area is art and art theory of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, particularly European modernism and the historic avant-garde movements, their reception beyond Europe, the role of artists’ networks and other forms of artistic exchange, the emergence and ideologization of abstract art, and interrelations between art, science and technology in modern and contemporary art.

Among the research projects and research groups she has organized are:

Wünsche has had fellowships with The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California (2003–2004), the Nancy and Norton Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (2003–2004, 2007), the National Humanities Center, North Carolina (2007–2008), the Institute for Advanced Study, Collegium Budapest (2008–2009), and New Europe College Institute for Advanced Study, Bukarest (2016).

In 2021, she was selected as a scout by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the Henriette Herz Scouting Program.