Carolyn L. Mazloomi is a quilt maker. Mazloomi describes herself as an African American woman who was born in the Jim Crow–segregated South and continues to survive the psychological and physical violence of white supremacy.

Her birth has shaped everything about her life. She believes quilts as visual media pose an alternative and nonthreatening approach to social issues about people and events that are embedded in the American memory as sensitive cultural parameters of race, class, and gender and labeled as the “tough stuff of American history.” She uses her artwork to prompt a dialogue between the artist and the viewer, challenging existing notions and posing questions that serve to move the discussion of racial reconciliation forward into the next generation of problem solvers.

Widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, her work is part of the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte, NC, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is also included in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

She has been awarded the Ohio Heritage Fellowship Award and the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Award, the highest award in the nation for traditional art. She founded the Women of Color Quilters Network, which has been a major force in fostering the fiber artworks of African Americans. Mazloomi has curated twenty-five quilt exhibitions and written fifteen books about African American quilts.