Mary Lois Kissell (1864–1944) was a pioneer in the comparative cultural study of textiles and basketry, an art educator, a museum anthropologist, and an intrepid fieldworker. When she died in 1944, no obituary was written about her, and since then, no study has focused on her contributions to textile scholarship. We have not come to know her, our “object of study,” through a single collection of personal papers; as far as we can tell, nothing of the kind was ever deposited in any repository. The correspondence that we have amassed by and about Kissell comes from various archives in North America and Europe.1 These scattered letters attest to her extensive research and teaching, and to her miscellany of distinguished art-educator, anthropologist, and collector-scholar correspondents and mentors: Otis T. Mason, Arthur W. Dow, Clark Wissler, Charles C. Willoughby, Thomas A. Joyce, Henry Ling Roth, Baron Erland Nordenskiöld, Charles F. Newcombe, and James A. Teit, to name a few. In this paper we examine how Kissell appears to have simultaneously inhabited and been influenced by several communities of practice, while being marginal to each of them. Although her work left an imprint on the study of textiles, she and her pioneering publications are rarely anything more than a footnote or a bibliographic entry. We offer a rendering of Kissell’s life history that demonstrates how she lived within a series of separate disciplinary boundaries. In so doing, we highlight the social networks that interacted through her figure. This biographical sketch serves as an introduction to Kissell, and raises the question of the impact of her training and life-long innovations on textile study Less