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 on Lobi art history in 2019. In 2021, he organized and moderated a three-part, multidisciplinary symposium on African art with nine international scholars. In 2022, he curated five exhibitions of African art for the inaugural installation at the Stanley Museum of Art. His student-curated exhibition, Alternate Paths: New Histories of Art from African to America, is the result of his spring 2024 class, “Curating African Art in America,” and is the Stanley Museum’s first traveling exhibition. Since 2019, Gundlach has taught multiple courses in African art history and museum studies.

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. This Mellon grant also provided support for the Stanley Museum’s restitution project. In 2024, Gundlach and Mellon Curatorial Fellow Peju Layiwola returned two objects directly to the Oba of Benin, thus marking the Stanley as the first museum to do so in North America.

Gundlach holds a B.A. in fine 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 Director of Iowa's African Studies Program in 2024.