Sabine Eckmann joined the Kemper Art Museum as curator in fall 1999 and also regularly teaches seminars in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences. Eckmann, a native of Nürnberg, Germany, is a specialist in 20th and 21st-century European art and visual culture with a particular focus on the intersection of art and politics, ranging from exile art and cold-war aesthetics to European post-unification art. Other research interests include avant-gardism, new art forms, media, critical theory and cultural studies.

Eckmann earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree in art history from the University Erlangen-Nürnberg, in 1984 and 1987, respectively. She then studied at University Erlangen-Nürnberg and University of Köln, earning a doctorate in 1993. Prior to arriving in St. Louis, she taught at the University of Tulsa and served as exhibition associate for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's acclaimed Exiles + Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (1997).

Fluent in English, German, Italian and French, Eckmann has lectured widely and contributed essays to numerous books and periodicals, including volumes on Max Beckmann, John Heartfield, Roberto Matta and Felix Nussbaums. She edited and contributed essays to the catalogs for Exiles + Emigrés, H. W. Janson and Exil und Moderne. She also recently completed a manuscript on Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture, co-edited with Lutz Koepnick, associate professor of German and of Film and Media Studies, both in Arts & Sciences.