Shelly Zegart

Shelly Zegart (March 11, 1941 – July 22, 2025)^[1] was an American quilt collector, historian, and advocate. She was involved in the establishment of several quilting organizations and is best known for her work promoting quilting as an art form and archiving quilting history.^[2]

Shelly Zegart was born Shelly Weiss in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on March 11, 1941.^[1] Her mother, Thelma, was a pianist and member of an all-female band that travelled the East Coast of the United States in the 1930s.^[2] Her father, David H. Weiss (1905–1979),^[3] was a Jewish refugee who fled from Czechoslovakia to the United States. He served 6 terms as a Pennsylvania state representative starting in 1937, then as assistant district attorney, and then was elected as a judge.^[2][4]

She was raised in Monessen, Pennsylvania, and had two siblings.^[1] As a child, she was interested in collecting, and often went antiquing with her mother.^[2]

She earned a Bachelor's degree in education at the University of Michigan.^[1][5] In 1968 she moved with her family to Louisville, Kentucky.

She developed an interest in quilts in the 1970s, when she began decorating her home with them.^[2] From then on, she was a quilt collector, lecturer, exhibition curator and an author on various aspects of quilt aesthetics and history. Zegart owned a personal collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century quilts. Zegart's work was popular with Japanese audiences and international quilt enthusiasts.^[6]

Her lecture topics included "Quilts as Women's Art", "Political Quilts" and "Misperceptions versus Reality in the World of Old Quilts." Zegart's first international project was an exhibit in 1987 of Kentucky quilts for the Women's Committee of the National Trust of Australia in Sydney.^[7]

Zegart was one of the founding directors of The Kentucky Quilt Project, the first statewide quilt documentation project in the United States. As such, she was a pioneer of quilt documentation in the United States. Zegart's book American Quilt Collections: Antique Quilt Masterpieces was published by Nihon Vogue in Tokyo (1998). In her latest days, she was executive producer and host of the documentary series Why Quilts Matter, History, Art & Politics. The series aired on public broadcasting television stations across the United States.^[8][9][10]

She married her husband, Kenneth Zegart, on June 17, 1962.^[11] Kenneth was an OB/GYN and a hobbyist magician. He died on May 6, 2025.^[12]

Shelly died a few weeks later, on July 22, 2025, at her home in Louisville. She was 84.^{[1][11][13][14]}

In 2020, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear awarded her the Folk Heritage Award.^[11]

• Alma Lesch
• Bonnie Leman
• History of quilting
• List of quilters

• Official website (archived via the Wayback Machine)

• Shelly Zegart at IMDb
• Obituary blog post at The Quilt Show