Katherine Westphal (January 2, 1919 – March 13, 2018) was an American textile designer and fiber artist who helped to establish quilting as a fine art form.

The scholarship provided funds for travel to Mexico, where she visited the studios of muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera.

She stayed, became a tenured faculty member in 1968, and turned a design appreciation class that no one wanted, into one enrolling 300 students each term, with ten assistants working with her.

Basically, I'm a tourist, moving around the world to faraway places either by actually traveling to the spot or by using the armchair method.

Then it all pops out in my work - someone else's culture and mine, mixed in the eggbeater of my mind to create a reality for me and a better understanding of what I have seen or experienced.

As a trained painter, she brought appreciation for a traditionally female craft to an accepted medium of expression in contemporary art.

She became a pioneer in pursuing new avenues of textile printing and image generation - including the use of the office Xerox copy machine, and heat transfer on both cloth and handmade paper.

[18] She was recognized as a "permission-giver", one who showed that nothing was off limits, including feminist revaluation of "women's work", and escape from textile traditions of precision and order.