Panelists:

Allison Rainboth:

Allison Rainboth, of Berlin, Wisconsin, is an AQS Certified Appraiser and NACQJ Certified Quilt Show Judge. She is the administrator of the AQS Appraiser Certification Committee, which tests candidates for certification. In addition, she owned and operated a longarm quilting business, Sisters Choice Quilting Service, from 2003-2023, where she completed more than 3200 pieces for clients. Allison tried very hard not to collect quilts, but now owns a sizeable teaching collection which she uses for her popular lectures.

Emily Schlemowitz:

Emily Schlemowitz has served as WMQFA's Senior Curator for eight years. She has previously held curatorial, research, and editing positions at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the Robert Motherwell catalog raisonné, Yale University Press, and MoMA. She holds an MA in Art History from CUNY, Hunter College, and a BA from Smith College. Her expertise lies in contemporary fiber art and multidisciplinary practices, and she currently sits on the Surface Design Association's Exhibitions Committee.

Sophie Pitman:

Sophie Pitman is Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A specialist in the Early Modern period, with a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, she now researches and teaches widely using the collection of over 13,000 historic global textiles. Pitman recently curated Find Your Quilt, an exhibition about the past, present, and future of quilting for the Ruth Davis Design Gallery at UW Madison (October 2025–March 2026). This exhibition showcased masterpieces and hidden treasures from the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection spanning an early 19th C wholecloth quilt, to a rare example of a theorem stencil quilt, and new accessions formerly from Roland Freeman's collection of quilts from the Mississippi, alongside quilts by 6 contemporary artists. Pitman is currently working on a project exploring the making of artificial flowers, based on an eighteenth-century manuscript that reveals some of the recipes and processes used by Benedictine nuns in Bruges. Using textiles and clothing as a lens through which to explore the world, through her research, teaching, and curatorial projects, she is interested in the entire life of objects: what they are made of, who made them and how, how they were used, and what they meant to makers, owners, observers, and collectors.