Kathleen Kiefer studied printmaking at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY and flat pattern drafting and draping at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City before earning a B.S. in Clothing and Textiles from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. Following a stint in the dental health care field, during which time she studied art history and chemistry, and trained with conservators at the University of Texas, Kiefer worked as an assistant conservator in the paper conservation laboratory of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She completed WUDPAC in 1995, earning a M.S. and majoring in textiles. Kiefer spent most of her third year internship at the Mc Cord Museum of Canadian History in Montreal, where she worked with costume and textiles, ethnographic materials and an 11 th-century B. C. Egyptian mummy. The final two months of her third year were at the Textile Conservation Centre, Hampton Court Palace, Surrey, UK. Summer work projects were at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, preparing objects for a major exhibition of hats, and at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, surveying historic costume in the museum’s collection. Following graduation from Winterthur, Kiefer was employed as an assistant conservator with the Textile Conservation Center, a regional conservation center at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, and as project conservator with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, for the term of a grant-funded undertaking to document, conserve and re-house the museum’s collection of south pacific tapa/barkcloth. She is actively involved with several professional organizations. She currently serves on the board of the AIC’s Textile Specialty Group and is a member of the Costume Society of America’s committee for Grants to Support Costume in Small Museums.

Kathleen recently accepted a position at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.