Dr Elisa Germán is the Lunder Curator of Works on Paper and Whistler Studies at the Colby College Museum of Art, where she oversees the museum’s collection of prints, drawings, and Photographs and all artwork by James McNeill Whistler in the Lunder Collection. Recently, Elisa curated several exhibitions, including Surface Tension: Etchings from the Collection (2024–2025), Drawn to Memory: Modern and Contemporary American Drawings (2024–2025), and Photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo (2025). She is currently organizing two exhibitions, Is anything the matter? Drawings by Laylah Ali (2025–2026) and The Sun Never Sets: Photographs and Prints of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library (2026), and is also serving as a consulting curator for the forthcoming retrospective on James McNeill Whistler at the Tate Britain (2026) and is a project lead for the related conservation project, Whistler’s Finish.
Previously, Elisa held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Harvard Art Museums, where she co-curated the exhibition, American Watercolors, 1880–1990: Into the Light (May–August 2023). Elisa holds a PhD from Boston University where she completed a dissertation on printmaking in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and Francoist era.
