Elena Kanagy-Loux’s research into global lace history and the lives of lacemakers is grounded in her own experience as a maker. After earning a BFA in Textile Design from FIT, she won a grant which funded a four-month trip to study lacemaking across over a dozen Europe countries. Upon returning to NYC, she co-founded Brooklyn Lace Guild, an organization dedicated to the preservation of making lace by hand, and began teaching bobbin lace classes. In 2018 she completed her MA in Costume Studies at NYU where she based her thesis on field research conducted on her European travels, and began working as the Collections Specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was commissioned to create special bobbin lace designs for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2018 and for the BGC exhibition Threads of Power: Lace in the Textilmuseum St. Gallen in 2022, as well as to create an experimental lace reconstruction to the EU-funded project Refashioning the Renaissance. She has contributed to research and events in conjunction with exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the American Folk Art Museum, and more, and lectures widely on lace for students of textiles and fashion.