Ronit Eisenbach is an architect, artist, curator, and educator whose scholarship and multi-disciplinary spatial practice aims to engage others in dialogue about the world we make for ourselves. Combining art, design and architecture, she explores how the perception of subjective, invisible and ephemeral objects affects understanding and experience of place. An interest in thinking through making and refining perception has led her to teach a series of situation-based, design-build studios that frame elements of architecture such as light, color, space, and shadow.
At Maryland she teaches undergraduate and graduate architecture studios, contemporary theory, an introductory course about the built environment. She has also designed interdisciplinary courses that she has co-taught with faculty in dance and art. A new course “Making Place: Public Art and Design” developed with Sculpture Professor John Ruppert and Urban Planning Professor Gerrit Knapp has been selected by the Academy of Innovation & Entrepreneurship as a new “Fearless Ideas Course.”
Venues for Eisenbach's work include: the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Graham Foundation, the Cranbrook Art Museum, Princeton University, the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, and the streets of Tel Aviv. Collaborations with choreographers, Peter Sparling, Dana Reitz, Bebe Miller, and Sharon Mansur, have resulted in a series of performance/installation works that explore relationships between gesture, inhabitation, and place. These include: Detroit 300: Fast Forward, Play Back, Placing Space, Memory House/Desire House and Out of Place. Her current research and creative work focuses on the potential for a catalytic relationship between ephemeral works and sites-in-flux.
Eisenbach’s design work is recognized with awards from the AIA, ACSA and ID magazine and has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Graham Foundation, Detroit Institute of Arts, University of Michigan Arts of Citizenship program, Maryland State Arts Council and others. Reviews have appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, Public Art Review, The Washington Post, Washington Times, Sculpture Magazine, + Metropolis.
Eisenbach co-authored, Installation by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design, co-produced the documentary film, The Radiant Sun: Designer Ruth Adler Schnee, and curated Ruth Adler Schnee: A Passion for Color and Design for the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, Italy and UMD’s Kibel Gallery, which she directs. A graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Rhode Island School of Design, Eisenbach is a former member of the ACSA Board of Directors and a current member of the National Building Museum's Education Committee. She is faculty fellow of NYU's Center for Creative Research, a Beverly Willis Architecture Fellow, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a MacDowell Fellow.