[1] Gladys-Marie Fry was born on April 6, 1931 in Washington, D.C.,[2] in the Freedmen's Hospital on the Howard University campus, where her father was Chairman of the Architectural Department.

[citation needed] Fry is famous for the following two seminal folklore works: She died on November 7, 2015, at the age of 84 from a heart attack.

[2] In 1976, Fry published landmark research about American quilt maker Harriet Powers' life in Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976, an exhibit catalog.

This was the first full-scale investigation about the life and Bible-themed quilts of Powers (an African American slave, folk artist and quilt maker from rural Georgia, whose surviving works are on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts).

[10] John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships to Assist Research and Artistic Creation: 1995: US & Canada Competition Humanities - Folklore & Popular Culture.