The work of The Alliance is carried out by a Board of Directors and Board Committees that include quiltmakers, quilt scholars, quilt industry representatives, and others with related expertise and a commitment to quilts. The Board and its committees are actively involved in planning and implementation of Alliance projects.
Co-President - Linda Pumphrey
Co-President - Le Rowell
Vice President - Meg Cox
Secretary - Janneken Smucker
Treasurer - Dorothy L. West
Chair, Projects Committee - Merikay Waldvogel
Regional Centers Representative - Mary Evelynn Sorrell
Biographies of Board Members
Katherine J. Adams served from 1981 to 2002 as associate director of the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Her responsibilities included collection development, publications, and administration of Winedale, a complex of historic structures and modern educational facilities located in rural south-central Texas. She helped establish the Center's Winedale Regional Center for the Quilt. Kate has lectured and published on southern women's history, printed ephemera, and library history; she is co-editor of and a contributor to Inside the Natchez Trace Collection: New Sources for Southern History (1999). She held an editorial fellowship at the University of Oklahoma Press, and she received training in archival administration at the National Archives. She holds an MA in history from the University of Oklahoma and an MA in library science from the University of Texas. Kate retired in December 2001 and is currently busy gardening, swimming, reading, and being a novice quilter. She and her husband David own an Alaskan truck camper and travel often.
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Meg Cox, journalist and author, learned quiltmaking from her mother in 1989, and has been a passionate quilter ever since. She spent three years researching a guidebook for quilters, to be published in 2006 by Workman Publishing. Cox, known nationally as an authority on family traditions, has been hired as an expert on rituals by such corporations as Pillsbury and Hallmark. She has written two acclaimed books and countless magazine articles on rituals, and lectures frequently. Her book The Book of New Family Traditions was published in 2003 by Running Press. Bristol Myers Squibb bought copies for all the families who use its daycare centers. Cox spent 17 years as a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, in the Chicago and New York bureaus, where her beats ran the gamut from agriculture to culture. Cox lives in Princeton, New Jersey with her husband, Richard Leone, a foundation president, and her son, Max, who loves to sleep with her quilts.
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Patricia Cox Crews is Willa Cather Professor of Textiles and Director of the International Quilt Study Center (IQSC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The IQSC, created under Crews’ leadership, is an endowed academic center that holds the world’s largest public collection of quilts. She served as advisor to the Nebraska Quilt Project Committee and as primary editor for Nebraska Quilts and Quiltmakers, which won the Smithsonian's Frost Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Crafts in 1993. Her more recent books include A Flowering of Quilts (University of Nebraska Press, 2001) and Wild by Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts (University of Washington Press, 2003). Wild by Design won the 2004 Textile Society of America’s Shep Award for best book in the field. She earned her B.S. from Virginia Tech; her M.S. from Florida State University and her Ph.D. from Kansas State University where her specialization was in textiles with a minor in American history.
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Barbara G. Fant is active in historic preservation, winning an AIA award for the restoration of Middlekauff Farm in Sharpsburg, Maryland, and a Historic Fredericksburg (Virginia) Foundation award for restoration of the Stevenson-Doggett house. She taught social sciences at the Washington Technical Institute (a forerunner to UDC), chaired her area's first elected advisory neighborhood commission and raised private funds to build a community recreation center at Horace Mann Elementary School before working as a research associate and fund raiser at the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies. Her interest in quilting as an art form and cultural artifact was inspired by the 19th century quilts made by her maternal grandmother's Pennsylvania Deutsche family members. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, she was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and currently lives in Washington, DC. She received her A. B. degree from Mount Holyoke College, a master's in teaching from Harvard University, and a doctoral degree in American civilization from George Washington University.
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Jerry Goldman
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Jan Grigsby
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Amy Henderson is a doctoral candidate in American art history at the University of Delaware and currently writing her dissertation on late eighteenth-century Philadelphia architecture and interior decoration. In the fall of 2005 she begins a one-year Barra Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Henderson has developed an understanding of the decorative arts and material culture through her work at several museums, including the National Museum of American History, The Walter's Art Museum, Bard Graduate Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the De Young Museum in San Francisco. Her quilt scholarship includes research on the reception of Lancaster County Amish quilts by twentieth-century collectors. She received her B.A. in art history from Grinnell College in Iowa and her M.A. in art history from the University of Delaware.
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Angela Hodapp is the senior features editor at Quilters Newsletter magazine. After earning a BA in English and secondary education from the University of Northern Colorado in 1996, she worked with at-risk teenagers in a residential facility and taught junior high English, speech, mass media, art, and crafts. In 2002, she completed her master’s coursework in English and communication development at Colorado State University; her thesis is still in progress. That same summer, she graduated from the Publishing Institute at the University of Denver. Angie learned to crochet, knit, and cross-stitch when she was very young, and she received her first sewing machine for her high school graduation. She taught herself to sew clothing, handbags, dolls, and, eventually, quilts, which are now all she makes. Angie also writes fiction and creative nonfiction and dabbles in drawing and painting.
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Katherine Burger Johnson is Archivist for Manuscript Collections at the University of Louisville (U of L) Archives and Records Center, where she has worked since 1994. Her duties at UARC include responsibility for all non-university collections, providing reference service, and serving on the Programs and Exhibits Committee for the William F. Ekstrom Library, where she has curated over ten exhibits. In 1999 she began working also as Archivist/Curator at the Kornhauser Health Sciences Library. At Kornhauser she manages the rare book collection and the historical collections related to the history of the U of L schools of medicine, dentistry, and nursing, and the general history of the health sciences in the local area. She also serves as an affiliated faculty member of the U of L Department of Women's and Gender Studies. Johnson's research interests are in 20th century social and women's history, with concentrations in nursing and medical care in World War I, and on Louisville women. She has written and presented extensively on these topics at national and international conferences. She also wrote the University of Louisville's section of the NEH grant for the pilot project of the Quilt Index and oversaw the input of the quilt data from the Kentucky Quilt Project. Johnson earned her Bachelor of Liberal Studies and her Master of Arts in History from U of L. She has additional archival training from the Modern Archives Institute at the National Archives and Records Administration.
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Patricia Keller is an independent curator and a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization Program, Department of History, University of Delaware. Her dissertation focuses on the introduction of home quiltmaking and changes in household textile production in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1750-1885. She writes and lectures frequently on quilted textiles and other decorative arts topics. She is the author of Of the Best Sort but Plain: Delaware Valley Quaker Quilts (1996), and organized the exhibition it accompanied. As Director/Curator of the Heritage Center Museum of Lancaster County from 1984-93, she organized numerous exhibitions interpreting regional decorative arts. She was Project Designer for the Chester County (Pennsylvania) Quilt Documentation Project (2002-03), and directed The Lancaster County Quilt Harvest, a documentation project sponsored by The Heritage Center Museum of Lancaster County. She received an M.A. in Early American Culture from the Winterthur Program, University of Delaware.
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Mark Kornbluh is Director of MATRIX, The Center for Humane Arts. Letters, and Social Sciences OnLine and Associate Professor of Historty at Michigan State. The largest humanities technology center in an American university, MATRIX's research focuses on multimedia digital repositories, educational uses of online content, and the use of the Internet for development. Kornbluh serves as the principal investigator on a wide variety of online educational projects including the Quilt Index and Historical Voices. As a historian, Kornbluh is a specialist in Modern American political and cultural history. The author of Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern Electoral Politics, 1880-1918, Kornbluh's historical scholarship focuses on political participation in the United States.
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Jane Evins Leonard grew up living in and translating the cultures of Washington, DC, and the rural highland rim area of middle Tennessee. She began collecting and resonating with quilts as a teenager, and the lure, lore, and love of them continue. She earned a B.A. in French from the University of Tennessee and a M.A.T. from Vanderbilt University and taught in public and private schools in Tennessee, Connecticut, and North Carolina. She earned a J.D. from Vanderbilt Law School and was admitted to the Bar in Tennessee, DC, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Her legal interests include estates, property, and mediation. As mother of four, she shifted from workplace to home, editing school and neighborhood newsletters, serving two terms as an elected DC Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, and chairing The Pilgrimage, a DC hostel and seminar center. She currently heads the Joe L. Evins Foundation, a Tennessee nonprofit corporation, and is renovating a historic Tennessee home, continuing as cross-cultural interpreter.
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Marsha MacDowell is professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Art and Art History and curator of folk arts at the Michigan State University Museum. She is coordinator of the Michigan Traditional Art Program (a statewide partnership program with the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs) and the Great Lakes Quilt Center/MSU Museum. Her major research interests have been focused on describing and analyzing traditional arts--especially those of women, Michigan, Native American, and South Africa--and the use of folk arts in education. She has curated numerous quilt exhibitions and authored numerous publications on quilts, including Michigan Quilts: 150 Years of Textile Tradition, the resulting publication of one of the first statewide quilt documentation projects. With her husband, C. Kurt Dewhurst, she curated the nationally touring 1997 exhibition "To Honor and Comfort: Native Quilting Traditions" at the National Museum of American Indians. She received an M.F.A. in Studio Art and Ph.D. in Education from Michigan State University.
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Yvonne Porcella has been teaching quilt techniques since the early 1970s. She is founder and past president of Studio Art Quilt Associates, and currently serves on the Advisory Board of the International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, as well as the Board of Directors of The Alliance. She is the author of nine books, a member of the Quilters Hall of Fame, and a Silver Star honoree of the International Quilt Association. Her art quilts have been acquired by major museums in the U.S. including The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.
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Linda Pumphrey is National Sales Manager for Leggett & Platt. Since joining the Mountain Mist team in 1989, she has promoted the brand, developed national marketing programs and new quilting related products. She is currently Curator of the Historical Mountain Mist Corporate Quilt Collection. She has served on the Advisory Board of the International Quit Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; treasurer of the American Quilt Study Group and currently is Vice President of Public Service of the International Quilt Association and on the Advisory Board for Quilts' Inc, Houston, TX. Her love of quilting grew from her mother and her grandmothers. She can trace back that there have been quilters in her family for at least five generations. She holds a M.B.A from the University of Denver.
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Justine Richardson is a documentary videomaker and educational media specialist, currently working at MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University. Ms. Richardson serves as project director and manager for a number of MATRIX development and project activities including the Quilt Index and the Quilt Treasures projects. She has ten years experience in film and video production for public television, community development and nonprofit organizations. For six years she worked at Appalshop, an Appalachian media arts center located in her hometown of Whitesburg, Kentucky. There she produced several documentary productions including Girls' Hoops, a history of girls' basketball in Kentucky, which was broadcast on PBS in 2000. She grew up loving quilts and surrounded by excellent traditional quiltmakers in her community. Her academic background includes a bachelor's degree in art history from Yale University and a master's degree in American Studies from Michigan State University.
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Keisha Roberts is an artist, curator, and researcher whose work integrates cultural, familial, and personal memory, commemoration, silence and narrative. She wrote the chapter Resistance and Political Struggles in the book Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South, which won several awards including the Southern Regional Council's Lillian Smith Book Award. Roberts is executive director of QuiltProQuo, president pro tem of the Professional Art Quilt Alliance-South, and is actively engaged on several museum boards and committees. She has curated and exhibited in exhibitions across the country and her work is held in private and public collections in the United States, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and South Africa. She holds degrees in African and African American studies, history, and women's studies, and a certificate in communications from Duke University, and is currently studying nonprofit management at Duke University and collections management and preventive conservation in the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program in Collection Care at The George Washington University.
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Le Rowell is an independent curator and speaker who has produced numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and overseas. She introduced American quiltmaking to Bolivia, Portugal and Luxembourg and gave workshops in Kyrgyzstan. She founded the International Quilt Guild of Luxembourg. Her exhibition for Luxembourg's year as "Cultural Capital of Europe" (1995) showcased American-influenced art quilts. In 2001 she became co-chair of the Q.S.O.S Task Force. She was on the National Advisory Council of the American Folk Art Museum in New York City (1989-1996) and since 1996 has been a board member of the Virginia Quilt Museum, Harrisonburg, Virginia.
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Janneken Smucker is a PhD student in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Textile History/ Quilt Studies with a minor in Museum Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the co-author of Amish Crib Quilts from the Midwest: The Sara Miller Collection (Good Books, 2002) and curator of the International Quilt Study Center's traveling exhibit "At the Crossing: Midwestern Amish Crib Quilts and the Intersection of Cultures." She continues to investigate the cultural significance of quilts as part of her doctoral studies and aspires to be a museum textile curator.
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MaryBeth C. Stalp is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Northern Iowa. She received a B.A. from Regis University (1993), an M.A. from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (1996), and a Ph.D. at the University of Georgia (2001). Her dissertation research, an interview study with 70 contemporary U.S. women quilters, examines why middle-aged women engage in this traditional art form in contemporary times. She notes that despite the family tensions that can emerge around quilting, women continue to find joy from practicing quilting as a non-paid pursuit. In addition to quilters, Stalp also studies the emergence of Red Hat Societies, focusing on the leisure aspects of middle-aged women and the positive spin on aging promoted by RHS membership. She regularly teaches classes in Introductory Sociology, Popular Culture, Gender, and Qualitative Research Methods. Stalp sews clothing, knits and quilts regularly. Similar to other quilters, she has devoted an entire room in her house for sewing and quilting.
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Merikay Waldvogel is a researcher, writer, and curator of quilt-related history and has lectured extensively on quilts, especially those from the Depression era. She was the co-director of Quilts of Tennessee, a state documentation project, which resulted in a traveling exhibition and publication. She has curated exhibitions for museums, as well as traveling companies, and has written numerous articles on quilt research. She was a founding member of the American Quilt Defense Fund and served on the Board of Directors of the American Quilt Study Group. She received her B.A. in French from Monmouth College and an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan.
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Dorothy L. West was Project Coordinator for The Kentucky Quilt Project, Inc. (1981) and Business Manager for "Louisville Celebrates the American Quilt" (1992). She served as Treasurer for The Kentucky Quilt Project, Inc. from 1981-2003. After 17 years in the private sector, she retired as Executive Assistant and Office Administrator. She has a B.S. degree in Business Education from David Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, and taught at the secondary level for seven years. She was also active in teaching business classes in adult education.
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Heather A. Williams
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Mary E. Worrall is an Assistant Curator at the Michigan State University Museum. Among her activities at the MSU Museum, Worrall has served as project manager for the Quilt Index, curated numerous interpretive quilt exhibitions including Mary Schafer: A Legacy in Quilt History, Quilts Old and New: Reproductions from Michigan State University Museum, and Redwork: A Textile Tradition in America, and has written on quilts and quiltmaking. She is an avid quilter whose quilting experience includes teaching and working at a quilt shop. Worrall holds a bachelor’s degree in Public History from Western Michigan University and a M.A. in Art History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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