BIO

L Vinebaum, PhD (they/them) is a scholar, artist, educator, and activator working at the intersections of textiles and politics. Working across practice and theory, their various projects focus on textiles as social fabric, mobilized by artists and activists to bring people together as part of struggles for social, economic, and racial justice. They write extensively about "crafting community" and the formation of various types of community and social connection in collaborative, socially-engaged, contemporary fiber works.

Dr. Vinebaum is a member of the core curatorial team for the 2025-2026 exhibition Loss & Absence: the Lives and Legacies of Textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Their publications include commissioned book chapters include "Unraveling (some) contemporary fiber histories" in the forthcoming Material Matters: The Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles, Second Edition, "The Subversive Stitch Revisited" in A Companion to Textile Culture (Wiley 2020), "The Sewing Rebellion" in Makers, Crafters, Educators: Working for Cultural Change (Routledge 2019), "Outside the White Cube" in Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm 1930-present (Routledge 2017), and “Performing Globalization in the Textile Industry: Anne Wilson and Mandy Cano Villalobos" in The Handbook of Textile Culture (Bloomsbury 2016). Vinebaum is co-editor, with Dr. Kirsty Robertson, of “Crafting Community”, a special issue of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture (Vol. 14 No. 2, 2016). Published writings also include catalog essays and articles for Black Dog Press, YYZ Press Surface Design Journal, Counter-Signals, Mana Contemporary, Cooper Cole Gallery, and the Journal of Modern Craft online. They have organized, chaired, lectured, and presented papers at international academic conferences, including College Art Association, the association for the study of arts of the present (ASAP) Textile Society of America, Shared Ground: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Craft Studies, Performance Studies International, and The Subversive Stitch Revisited: The Politics of Cloth. L Vinebaum is Director at Large of the Textile Society of America, and was Associate Editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Textile: Cloth and Culture from 2014 to 2020. They are the recipient of a Craft Research Fund Award from the Center for Craft (2018), a Craft Research Fund Travel Grant from the Center for Craft (2016 and 2013), a Research Fellowship from the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017), and multiple Faculty Enrichment Grants from the Dean's Office at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dr. Vinebaum holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK), an MA in Textiles also from Goldsmiths, and a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, Québec (Canada). They are Associate Professor of Fiber and Material Studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, where they are affiliated full-time faculty in the department of Art History, Theory and Criticism.

Exhibitions and performances include solo shows at Sector 2337 and Spudnik Press, Artspace NY, Grace Exhibition Space, For the Thundercloud Generation, the Institute for Labor Generosity and Uniforms, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, with group exhibitions and screenings festivals and venues including Museum of Contemporary Craft, Woman Made Gallery, Heaven Gallery, Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival, Open Engagement, Freewaves Festival of New Media Arts, The New York Video Festival, Videomedeja, Videonale, Exploding Cinema, VideoFormes, and the European Media Art Festival.