Filmmakers

Shelly Zegart (1941 --2025) was an internationally recognized quilt historian, collector, curator, author, and advocate who helped establish quilts as an important American art form. Born in Pittsburgh on March 11, 1941, she earned a degree in education from the University of Michigan and later settled in Louisville, Kentucky.

In 1981, Zegart co-founded the Kentucky Quilt Project, the nation’s first statewide quilt-documentation project. Its success inspired similar surveys across the United States. She also co-founded the Alliance for American Quilts—now the Quilt Alliance—and helped develop the Quilt Index, an online archive documenting quilts and their makers.

Zegart was executive producer and host of the nine-part public television series Why Quilts Matter: History, Art & Politics, available on Folkstreams. The series explores quilts as works of art, historical documents, commodities, and expressions of women’s lives and communities. She also founded Kentucky to the World, an organization devoted to sharing Kentucky’s cultural achievements with a wider audience.

In 2020, Zegart received Kentucky’s Governor’s Award in the Arts Folk Heritage Award for her decades of work promoting quilts and quiltmakers. She died at her home in Louisville on July 22, 2025, at the age of 84.