Joni L. Kinsey received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1989 and joined the University of Iowa faculty in 1991.  She teaches a variety of classes, ranging from surveys of visual culture in the United States to thematic courses on American landscape painting, American print culture, art of the American National Parks, art and regional perspectives on America, and museum theory and practice, and Native American art.  Her research specialties include nineteenth-century landscape painting and art of the American West and Midwest, but her interests and research ranges widely, from nineteenth-century popular prints to the rise of women artists in the central U.S.  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 Thomas Moran's West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste (University Press of Kansas, 2006), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.  Her most recent publication is “Triangulating the View: The Allied Arts of the Great Surveys,” in Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas, edited by Julia Rosenbaum and Ernest Capello. Routledge Press (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK), 35-59.  In 2014 Professor Kinsey was a Fulbright Fellow in the United Kingdom and she is continuing to work on a book and possible exhibition from that experience, entitled Thomas Moran’s Britain: Transatlantic Visions of “The American Turner.”  She lectures frequently at professional conferences, symposia, and museums. 

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 Arts in painting at the University of Iowa in 1924 and devoted her life to making art.  Because she worked in a wide range of media, changed her style with the times, and wrote thoughtfully about her struggles and inspirations, her collection is a remarkably broad and rich representation of modern art and the issues that affected women artists in the twentieth century.  One or two art history graduate students work with the collection as research assistants under Professor Kinsey’s supervision.

Some of Kinsey’s lectures can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pap3l8G3AZ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysgLaXii9Qk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZTlj9AVp0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcg-7nyQyT8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGvU-cKO37I