Dolly Rudeman (born Gustave Adolphine Wilhelmina Rüdemann, 3 February 1902 – 26 January 1980) was a Dutch graphic designer who produced posters for some of the most famous directors and film stars of her day, including Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, and Greta Garbo.

Born in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to Dutch parents, her father died before she was born and her mother took the family back to the Netherlands when Rudeman was in her teens. Rudeman studied art and drawing from an early age, and in the early 1930s embarked on a career in design. Concerned that there was little financial stability in art, she turned towards the medium of poster design. In the twenties, she was the only woman designing posters for the film industry, and was a prolific designer of posters and printed programs for the Netherlands Cinema Trust.

Although work dried up during the Second World War—during which she aided Jews hiding from the occupying Nazis—she returned to poster design after the war. The 1950s have been termed her 'golden age', and during this decade she expanded into other forms of design such as for postcards, chocolate boxes, and ceramics. She never achieved the fame that she had before the war, however, and died in relative obscurity in Amsterdam in 1980.

Dolly Gustave Adolphine Wilhelmina Rüdeman was born on 3 February 1902 in Salatiga, Java. She was the second child to Adolf Rudeman, a sugar factory proprietor, who died six months before Dolly's birth, and his wife, Gerardina van Elsbroek. After Adolf's death Gerardina remarried, and the family moved to Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies. By 1916 they had moved to The Hague. Rudeman had one sister, who spent much of her life in Indonesia; they had very little contact in adulthood.

Rudeman attended high school for two years before joining the Hague Drawing Institute where she studied art. She later moved to The Hague's Royal Academy of Art, where, in August 1922, she obtained a teaching certificate in drawing. A classmate of Rudeman's later recalled that most of the class "went on to be more or less unknown" and "became housewives", while Rudeman, now in her twenties, was "already riding around on a motorbike". Initially, she considered a career in portraiture, but decided against it on the grounds, as she explained some years later, that she was "not well-off, and most Dutch people consider it a scandalous waste of money to have yourself painted."

Rudeman enrolled at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (the Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague and studied drawing, graduating in 1922. Wanting to design posters, she travelled to England to study under the illustrator and cartoonist, Charles Exeter Devereux Crombie. In the mid-1920s, having returned to the Netherlands, she began drawing posters for the Netherlands Cinema Trust. Having moved into her own studio, she taught private pupils and produced general illustrations.

Rudeman's first poster—and one of the most famous of this period, which made her name—was the "vicious Cossack" for Eisenstein's 1925 movie Battleship Potemkin. A then-unheard of 7,500 copies were printed for the film's promotion. At the time it was "virtually unheard of" for Dutch film promoters to produce a particular poster for a single show, and they often resorted to the expediency of merely painting over the titles of foreign-produced posters. Het Vaderland, a Dutch evening newspaper, published from 1869 to 1982, declared that the "designer of the poster must be of the same persuasion [gender] as the director of the film." That same year, Rudeman was offered a permanent contract with the Netherlands Cinema Trust, and so achieved financial security.

Amidst flaming red and yellow a Russian soldier crushes a naked man beneath his boots. A bayonet is fixed threateningly to his rifle. His victim helplessly clenches his fists. The Cossack appears indifferent. With his shiny boots and his rifle, he personifies the cruelty of the Tsarist regime and his bloody victim symbolises the Russian people. The soldier is drawn with beautiful, angular lines. The design is full of expression and executed in bright colours. This austere, stirring image bears a single word, The Battleship Potemkin. For the Dutch public in 1926 that was more than enough.