Kathleen Kiefer is a textile conservator in private practice based in Houston, Texas. She also serves on the Board of TX-CERA, the Texas Collections Emergency Resource Alliance. Over the course of her career she has worked in a variety of conservation contexts and with a broad range of fiber-based materials. She was a textile conservator for the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum, Gardens & Library, where I also taught with the Winterthur/University of Delaware graduate program in art conservation, and at the Textile Conservation Center, a regional conservation center at the former American Textile History Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts. A priority for her now is to advocate for the importance of textiles within the hierarchy of material cultural heritage and to highlight the significant knowledge and skills necessary for and possessed by textile conservation specialists. She is committed to supporting the continued growth and development of the field textiles conservation and the individual practitioners devoted to understanding and preserving these often complex materials imbued with so much evidence of human ingenuity and experience. Kathleen a Professional Member of the AIC and a graduate of the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation.