The Austrian-born artist Erika Giovanna Klien (1900-1957), young promise of European modern art, arrives in the United States in 1929, a few days after the Wall Street Crash. As a single mother of an illegitimate child, she left to a step family in Austria, she was looking for a chance in the art world to come back to him as a successful artist. In New York she had to adapt her ambition to reality and built a career as art teacher, employing the cutting-edge method of her Viennese mentor Franz Cižek at some of the most renowned private schools and universities of the time. She never returned to Europe and it seems that she never met her son in person. In 1938 she obtained the naturalization, and in 1957 she died alone and forgotten in New York City. Today, her artistic value has been recognized, and she is regarded as the most significant exponent of the avant-garde movement of Viennese Kineticism. Nevertheless, there remain many blind spots in her biography, especially about the American years. Thanks to a thorough archival research travel in the USA, the expected finding of new materials, letters, and documents will substantially contribute to depict a round portrait of the artist, and to complete the script of the first full-length movie about her. The film Looking for Erika, directed by Elena Goatelli and Angel Esteban, takes also the form of a paradigmatic case study, proposing a collective reflection on both the position of women artists within the main stream narrative of art history, and the meaning of “success” in our society. The project is part of a broader multidisciplinary research program ongoing at Italian Institute for German Studies (IISG) in Rome.