An authority on Italian painting in the early modern period and an expert on early modern women artists and patrons, Eve Straussman-Pflanzer joined the National Gallery of Art in 2020 as curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings. She was previously the head of the European art department and the Elizabeth and Allan Shelden Curator of European Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) from 2016-2020, and has held posts at Wellesley College's Davis Museum in Massachusetts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Prior to her tenure at the DIA, Straussman-Pflanzer served as assistant director of curatorial affairs/senior curator of collections at the Davis Museum, where she oversaw the reinstallation of the permanent collection and curated the first monographic exhibition in the United States devoted to the 17th-century Florentine artist Carlo Dolci. She also curated a groundbreaking exhibition on Renaissance and baroque Italian women artists, which opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 2020 and at the DIA in February 2021. At The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago, Straussman-Pflanzer researched and published on European painting and sculpture from the Renaissance to the 18th century. At the Art Institute, she also curated the 2013 exhibition Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes.

Straussman-Pflanzer received a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and a BA from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.