Marsha MacDowell is Professor of Art, Art History, and Design at Michigan State University, Curator of Folk Arts at the Michigan State University Museum, and Director of the Quilt Index (www.quiltindex.org). She has authored many publications on traditional material culture and quiltmaking, including Quilts and Human Rights and Ubuntutu.
Clare Luz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Michigan State University. She is a gerontologist whose research focuses on quality of life for vulnerable older adults, long-term care health services, and the intersection of health, creativity, and the arts.
Beth Donaldson is Digital Humanities Project Asset Coordinator at the Michigan State University Museum and Coordinator of the Quilt Index. She is a quilt maker and coauthor of Quilts and Human Rights, among other publications on quilts.
Carolyn L. Mazloomi’s most recent book is Quilting African American Women’s History: Our Challenges, Creativity, and Champions. She is also the author of Threads of Faith, Textural Rhythms: Quilting the Jazz Tradition, and Spirits of the Cloth: Contemporary African American Quilts, which received “Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year” from the American Library Association. In 2003 she was awarded the first Ohio Heritage Fellowship Award, an award that recognizes the state’s living cultural treasures.