Kathleen Quaintance

Kathleen Quaintance is a historian of culture, technology, and craft. She studies textile processes and pedagogies in the twentieth century, and maintains a practice as a weaver, stitcher, and dyer to balance text-based research with textile-based knowledge. Her dissertation project, Obsolescence Looms: The Persistence of Modern Handweaving in America, c.1900-1969, explores how handweaving continued to be practiced, conceptualized, and taught as an experimental method long after the advent of the power loom, as modern weavers forged alternative relationships to new technologies.

She is the founder and organizer of the Yale Textile Working Group, an initiative sponsored by the Whitney Center for the Humanities, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Environmental Humanities program at Yale. The group provides a space for skill sharing and collective learning and serves a cross-disciplinary range of researchers and makers. Kathleen is also the resident craftsperson at the Yale Farm, where she facilitates natural dye processes, bridging the gap between artisanal and scientific knowledge. She teaches a range of craft workshops and is passionate about innovative pedagogy and welcomes collaboration with anyone interested in learning or teaching material knowledge, regardless of discipline.

She completed a BA in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MA in gender studies with the intent of untangling the gender-essentialized valences of craft labour. She has also worked as a textile art instructor, a cheesemonger, a printmaker, a studio technician, an early-childhood educator, an assistant curator, an archival researcher, and a museum educator. Her research has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Harvard Art Museums Institute for Technical Studies in Art, the Curatorial Practice Program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ertegun scholarship at the University of Oxford, and the Mellon-Marron research consortium at the Museum of Modern Art.