Ronit Eisenbach, RA
Visiting Associate Professor
Office: 1222 | Phone: 301-405-6298 | Email
B.F.A., 1985, Rhode Island School of Design; B. Arch., 1986, Rhode Island School of Design; M. Arch., 1992, Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Ronit Eisenbach was trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, Bezalel Academy of Art and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Prior to joining the Maryland faculty, Eisenbach was a tenured faculty member at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Eisenbach's creative and scholarly efforts are located at the intersection of art and architecture. Through the construction of temporary site-specific environments 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.
Her installations and maps have been exhibited both here 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, was recently recognized with an Honorable Mention by ID magazine.
Current projects include a co-authored book, Building Questions: Installations by Architects (with Dr. Sarah Bonnemaison); a research project, "Smart Sprawl," whose goal is to gain a better understanding of the relationship between development patterns and the effect upon a landscape's scenic value, (with Maryland colleagues, Dr. Sidney Brower, Prof. Jack Sullivan and Arnab Chakraborty); and the design of a web-based multi-media environment about the city of Detroit.
In recent years her creative and scholarly work has been supported by the National Center for Smart Growth, the University of Maryland Creative and Performing Arts Grant, the Great Lakes Fabricators and Erectors Association, the Graham Foundation, and the University of Michigan Arts of Citizenship program. She has recently been awarded a University of Maryland General Research Board Award to pursue creative and scholarly work during the Fall 2005 semester.
At Maryland she teaches undergraduate and graduate design studio, and contemporary theory. She has chaired the lecture series and curates the gallery. Eisenbach is a former member of the ACSA Board of Directors and a current member of the National Building Museum's Education Committee.