Ronit Eisenbach is an architect, artist, curator and educator whose scholarship and multi-disciplinary, spatial practice, StudioRED aims to spark dialogue through in situ shared experience about the world we make for ourselves. Combining visual art, performance, design, and architecture, she explores how perceptions of subjective, invisible and ephemeral objects affect understanding and experience of place. Her collaborative public practice includes site-specific installations and performances located in moments and sites-in-transition. A creative team builder, her works invites active participation, engaging a wide-range of partners in the ongoing effort of transforming, enhancing and attending to place.

Over the course of her career, Eisenbach has developed spatial strategies for joining architecture installations, exploratory performances and public participation in situ. Her ephemeral works spark dialogue about our relationships with the places we make for ourselves and with one another. Situated within museums, abandoned buildings and on public streets, Eisenbach’s projects simultaneously operate at (and connect) two spatial and temporal scales - the intimate scale of the individual and the public scale of the city - developing works that consider and intertwine the two. At the level of the individual, it is often the hand, its ability to touch, to mark, to make and to destroy that figures strongly in her work while at the city scale, her interventions serve as active place-making efforts capturing and transforming the public realm through temporary inhabitation or new use. Eisenbach’s work underscores how in-between places and transitional moments are particularly rich for uncovering and making visible essential aspects of our shared humanity. Tapping into a wide-range of emotions informed by place and shaped by people, her works offer opportunities for new rituals and meaning-making within the inherent tensions between flux and stability. Her public collaborative practice operates as “an action lab” -- illuminating inevitable loss and framing potential opportunities. Her focus on sites and communities in flux allows her to amplify the sense of change and continuity and possibility that we grapple and embrace daily.

Eisenbach's installations and maps have been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad in venues such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Graham Foundation, the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Princeton University and the streets of Tel Aviv. She was the Design Architect for the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture Renovation Master Plan. Her design for the first phase of the renovation, the Ronald F. Titus Digital Studio garnered two AIA awards.

Her installation, "Mom & Me, Me & Jonah," was honored with an ACSA Faculty Design award, and "Detroit 300: Fast Forward, Play Back" received an Honorable Mention in ID magazine. Articles about "Placing Space" and "Fast Forward, Play Back" were published in the Journal of Architectural Education. "Sculpture at Evergreen 6: Simultaneous Presence," co-curated with Jennie Fleming, and "Memory House/Desire House" both appear in Public Art Review Spring/Summer 2010. Her installations and curated exhibitions have also been reviewed in the Washington Post and Metropolis.

In 2010, Eisenbach published, with co-author Dr. Sarah Bonnemaison, Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design (Princeton Architectural Press). A film, "The Radiant Sun: designer Ruth Adler Schnee," co-produced with Terri Sarris, and an associated exhibition at the Kibel Gallery premiered at University of Maryland. In May 2010, "Sculpture at Evergreen 6: Simultaneous Presence," co-curated with Jennie Fleming, opened at Johns Hopkins University.

Eisenbach's creative and scholarly work has been supported by the Center for Creative Research, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, a University of Maryland Creative and Performing Arts Grant, the Great Lakes Fabricators and Erectors Association, the Graham Foundation, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the University of Michigan Arts of Citizenship program, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.

In 2019, Eisenbach launched a new initiative in creative placemaking with UMD National Center for Smart Growth. The Maryland Creative Placemaking Collaborative (MCPC) advances the goals of the Purple Line Development agreement but is intended to engage in communities well beyond the purple line corridor and advance research and practice in this new emerging field. MCPC focuses on developing creative solutions for the communities around Washington, D.C. region which have experienced and are experiencing rapid changes that intersect with concerns for arts and cultural programming.

At the University of Maryland, as Professor, she chairs the Kibel Gallery, teaches architectural design, and directs a general education undergraduate course, "Introduction to the Built Environment." She has served on the National Building Museum's Education Committee since 2005.

University of Maryland
School of Architecture

College Park, Maryland 20742

301.405.6298

rze@studiored.org

Note: Email is the preferred mode of communication.