Joni L. Kinsey received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1989. She teaches a variety of courses that range from surveys of visual culture in the United States to topical subjects such as landscape painting and print culture. She focuses her research on nineteenth-century landscape painting and western art, but she also has written on other subjects such as nineteenth century popular prints, Grant Wood, and women artists. She is the author of four books, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992; Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996; The Majestic Grand Canyon: 150 Years in Art, First Glance Books, 1998, and most recently Thomas Moran's West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste (University Press of Kansas, 2006). Recent articles include: "Modernism Ascendant: The Contested History of Modern Art at the University of Iowa in the Interwar Period,” in New Forms: The Avant-Garde Meets the American Scene, 1934-1948 (University of Iowa Press, 2013), and “Revolt Against the City: Art and Home in Iowa,” in Resisting the Place of Belonging: Uncanny Homecomings in Religion, Narrative, and Art, edited by Daniel Boscaljion (Ashgate Press, 2013).   In spring 2014 Professor Kinsey was a Fulbright Fellow in the United Kingdom in 2014, working on a new project, Thomas Moran’s Britain: Transatlantic Visions of “The American Turner.”

Professor Kinsey is also the curator of the Eve Drewelowe Collection, a remarkable corpus of hundreds of paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and personal effects of Eve Drewelowe, who bequeathed the collection to the School of Art & Art History in the late 1980s. Drewelowe received the first Master of Fine Arts degree in painting awarded at the University of Iowa in1924, and her collection is a remarkably broad ranging representation of modern art and the issues that affected women artists in the twentieth century.