Kathleen (Kat) Martin is the Avenir Conservation Center’s Textile Conservator. She has experience working with a variety of Indigenous North American textiles and garments. Her research interests are natural dyes and embellishments of beadwork, quillwork, and ribbonwork. She is focused on collaboration with Indigenous people to further understand and reconnect the personal and social histories inherent in textiles.
Her current endeavors at Denver Museum of Nature and Science are the Textile Research Project and the Southern Plains Beadwork Project, a collaboration with the First Americans Museum and Texas Tech University. In addition, she conserves the textiles in Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s collection and prepares them for outgoing loans to other museums.
Kathleen completed dual Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Art History and Painting at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana where her work skirted the line between sculpture and clothing. She received a Master’s Degree in Textile Conservation at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Textile Conservation and Technical Art History in Scotland in 2018 and was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Textile Conservation at the National Museum of the American Indian in Suitland, Maryland. Kathleen has also treated textiles for the National Museum of American History in DC, the National Maritime Museum in London, and the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh, Scotland. Kathleen spent a decade working in theatrical costuming in New York City before shifting her focus to Conservation in 2012.