Nicole LaBouff is Assistant Curator of Textiles in the Department of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. LaBouff worked previously in the Department of Costume and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she served as part of the curatorial team for the exhibition, Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915. In 2013 she completed a PhD in early modern European history at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation reinterprets the surviving embroideries of Mary Queen of Scots (1542-1587) and Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury (c.1527-1608) as notational and mnemonic devices. Rather than viewing needlework as a practice that distanced women from scholarly or spiritual pursuits, her project demonstrates the ways in which domestic crafts supported women's active engagement with classical, scientific, and religious texts during a pivotal phase in history. She also holds a BA (Anthropology) from the University of California, Berkeley; an MPhil (Archaeology) from Cambridge University; and an MA (History of Dress) from the Courtauld Institute of Art.