Project curator and co-author:

Marin Hanson is the International Quilt Museum’s (IQM) curator of international collections and is responsible for building and interpreting the museum’s non-Western collection. She earned an MA in Museum Studies and Textile History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a PhD in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester (UK). Hanson has been a curator at the IQM since 2001 and is editor of Abstract Design in American Quilts at 50 (2021) and co-editor of American Quilts in the Modern Age, 1870-1940 (2009). She is project curator for the IQM’s World Quilts website and contributor to several of its modules.

Co-authors:

Carolyn Ducey is curator of collections at the International Quilt Museum (IQM), a position she has held since 1998. Ducey oversees acquisition and management of the IQM collection of more than 8,500 quilts. Ducey earned an MA in American Art History from Indiana University in 1998, and her PhD in Textiles, Clothing & Design, with an emphasis in Quilt Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2010. She is co-editor of American Quilts in the Industrial Age 1760-1870 (2018) and co-author of What’s in a Name: Inscribed Quilts (2012).

Jonathan Gregory earned an MA in Textile History and PhD in Human Sciences from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research, curatorial work, and writing pursue twentieth-century American quiltmaking, particularly in relation to social engagement and meaning-making. Gregory is assistant curator of exhibitions at the IQM and oversees production of its many exhibition projects. He has contributed to several IQM publications including American Quilts in the Modern Age, 1870-1940 (2009) and American Quilts in the Industrial Age, 1760-1870 (2018), and to IQM’s World Quilts website.

Jonathan Holstein has been involved with the IQM since its inception and is currently a member of its Acquisition Committee. He is an art dealer and an independent curator in his fields of interest: quilts, Americana and Native American art. He has a BA from Harvard, was an editor at McGraw-Hill in New York, then in the 1960s began to photograph art and artists for books and exhibition catalogs. In the late 1960s he and his wife Gail van der Hoof began to collect American pieced quilts. This interest culminated in an initial quilt exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1971), and subsequent similar exhibitions in many museums in the United States and abroad. He wrote the catalog for that first exhibition, Abstract Design in American Quilts, and the catalog for their European exhibitions, American Pieced Quilts (1972), followed by The Pieced Quilt: An American Design Tradition (1973). For a remounting of the Whitney exhibition on its 20th anniversary he wrote Abstract Design in American Quilts: A Biography of an Exhibition. He continues to write about quilts, advise museums and collectors in his areas of interest, and curate quilt exhibitions for museums.

Nao Nomura is an associate professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Saitama University, Japan. She earned her MA in Museum Studies and Textile History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is working toward her PhD in American Studies from the University of Tokyo, Japan.  Her current research examines the intersection of religious identity and consumer culture in the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She is also interested in exploring the US-Japan relationship through the lens of quiltmaking.

Sandra Sider, a New York quilt artist since the early 1980s, holds an MA in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Sider has served as president of Studio Art Quilt Associates, and today she is Editor of Art Quilt Quarterly and Curator of the Texas Quilt Museum. She has written or edited more than a dozen books concerning contemporary quilt art, including Art Quilts Unfolding: Fifty Years of Innovation. She teaches the History of Textiles course in the MFA Textiles program at Parsons School of Design in New York and is a fabric designer for Benartex.