Marisa Anne Bass is a historian of early modern art whose research explores intersections between creative and intellectual culture, particularly in northern Europe. Bass thinks about works of art as sites where individual and collective experience meet. By examining episodes when artists responded to political, spiritual, and cultural upheaval, and when scholars, patrons, and collectors turned to art to make sense of inexplicable circumstances, she considers what art can and cannot do. She has published on topics including the representation of nature, the cult of images, portraiture, notions of imagination and invention, print culture, emblems, cartography, antiquarianism, monuments, and miniatures. Her books include Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (2016), Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (2019), and The Monument's End: Public Art and the Modern Republic (2024). 

At present, Bass is Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. She joined the Yale faculty in 2016 after holding previous teaching positions at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. Her research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the inaugural Guggenheim Fellowship in Early Modern Studies. In 2025, Bass was the Panofsky Professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

The photograph of Marisa Bass was taken by Cindy Ringer of LJR Images.