DETROIT, MICH.- The Detroit Institute of Arts has hired Eve Straussman-Pflanzer as head of the European art department and Elizabeth and Allan Shelden curator of European paintings. Straussman-Pflanzer comes to the DIA from Wellesley College, where she is assistant director of curatorial affairs and senior curator of collections at Wellesley’s Davis Museum. She begins at the DIA on May 2, 2016.

“Eve brings exceptional connoisseurship, scholarship and administrative skills to our curatorial team,” said Salvador Salort-Pons, DIA director. “Her leadership, community engagement and highly collaborative abilities will bring our prestigious European art department and collection to the next level of accomplishment and accessibility. Eve’s expertise includes southern Baroque art and women artists and patrons. Her interest in gender studies will provide a fresh perspective to learning more about our world-class collection, acquiring new works and creating innovative exhibitions in conjunction with our Learning and Interpretation department.”

Straussman-Pflanzer previously held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), where she researched and published on European painting and sculpture from the Renaissance to the 18th century. At the AIC, she curated the exhibition “Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi’s ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’” as well as installations on Ludovico Carracci and Picasso’s relationship to Spanish Golden Age painting. She contributed to the exhibition catalogues “Kings, Queens and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France” and “Capturing the Sublime: Five Centuries of Italian Drawing.” Straussman-Pflanzer also taught courses on early modern art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

At the Davis Museum, Straussman-Pflanzer led the curatorial team and organized special exhibitions, including “Figment of the Past: Venetian Works on Paper,” “Hanging with the Old Masters” and “Warhol@Wellesley.” She also shepherded the reinstallation of the permanent collection and is curating the first monographic exhibition in America on the Florentine 17th-century painter Carlo Dolci to open at the Davis on February 8, 2017 with a second venue at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C., later that year.

Straussman-Pflanzer earned her B.A. from Smith College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her dissertation focused on the art patronage of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere, an illustrious member of the Medici family.

Eve is a native New Yorker, an avid walker and an aficionado of all things edible.