Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Kenna Libes is a historian of dress and currently researches size bias within museum collections. Her other interests have included nineteenth-century African American wedding dress; beetle-wing embroidery and biomimicry within Indian and Anglo-European dress in the long nineteenth century; and the terminology of historic underwear, including jumps and the straight-front corset. She has published in Dress and for the Fashion History Timeline and has interned in collections, curatorial, and conservation departments in a variety of East Coast institutions including the National Museum of Asian Art, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the John Hay Library, and Museum Textile Services. She has been a Historical Interpreter for the DiMenna Children’s History Museum at the New-York Historical Society since 2019 and a research assistant for public-facing dress historians since 2020. She has contributed to exhibitions such as The Roaring Twenties & The Swinging Sixties (Museum at FIT Grad Studies, 2021) and Highland Threads (West Highland Museum, Scotland, 2021). She holds an MA in Public Humanities from Brown University, an MA in Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice from the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, and a BA in History from Georgetown University.