In 1998, Gundlach began his museum career at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, California. From 2004 to 2010, he worked in public art administration and museum exhibition design in Fort Collins, Colorado. He enrolled in Iowa’s graduate program in African art history in 2010 and completed field research on Lobi-style figure sculpture in southwest Burkina Faso in 2011 and 2012, and later researched contemporary art in Senegal and Ghana.

Gundlach began work as a curatorial research assistant at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art in 2012 and was appointed full-time as curator of African art in 2015. He defended his dissertation in 2019, and in 2021, organized and moderated a three-part symposium on African art with nine scholars from around the world.

Gundlach has taught survey courses African art, an upper-division course on Central African art, and is currently teaching “Curating African Art in America” in partnership with Indiana University. In 2022, he curated five exhibitions of African art for the inaugural installation at the Stanley Museum of Art.

In 2023, he and museum director Lauren Lessing received a $400,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support two-years of provenance research on the museum’s African collection.

Gundlach holds a B.A. in studio art from Cal Poly Humboldt, a B.A. in art history from CSU Fort Collins, and a Ph.D. in African art history from Iowa. He was appointed head of Iowa's African Studies Program in 2024.