Else Meidner, born Else Meyer in Berlin in 1901 and died in London in 1987, was a German-Jewish Expressionist painter. Her career spans interwar Berlin, exile caused by the Nazi regime and the postwar decades in England, and her portraiture offers a valuable record of an artist shaped by persecution.
She studied art in Berlin from 1918 to 1925 and then spent two years in Cologne. She specialised in portraits, though she also painted landscapes and symbolic scenes. By the late 1920s she had gained recognition in Berlin's artistic circles, and her first solo exhibition, the Libre de jurado show, received good reviews. The arrival of Nazism in 1933 interrupted her career. She had married the painter Ludwig Meidner in 1927, and in 1939 the couple emigrated to England, where she worked as a domestic servant in London.
After the Second World War the couple drifted apart, both personally and artistically. Ludwig returned to Germany in 1952, while Else stayed in London. In 1963 she went back to Germany briefly to care for him, but eventually returned to London, where she spent the rest of her life. Her work was afterwards shown at the Ben Uri Gallery in London, the Galerie Hanna Bekker vom Rath in Frankfurt and several London venues, including the Matthiesen Gallery, the Beaux Arts Gallery and the Leicester Gallery.