Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has personally organized more than 25 exhibitions, including The Corset: Fashioning the Body, Gothic: Dark Glamour, A Queer History of Fashion, and Paris, Capital of Fashion. She is founder and editor in chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, the first peer-reviewed, scholarly journal in Fashion Studies.

Described in The Washington Post as one of fashions brainiest women Steele combines serious scholarship (and a Yale Ph.D.) with a rare ability to communicate with general audiences. She is author or co-author of more than two dozen books, including Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, Women of Fashion, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power, and Fashion Designers A-Z: The Collection of The Museum at FIT. As an author, curator, editor, and public intellectual, Valerie Steele has been instrumental in creating the modern field of fashion studies and has appeared on many television programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show and Undressed: The Story of Fashion. www.fitnyc.edu/museum · www.creativeprocess.info