Natalie Wright

Natalie Wright is a PhD candidate in Design History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled “Functional Fashions: A History of Dress and Disability in the United States, 1950-1975,” explores the under-researched but crucial role that clothing played in the cultural construction of disability and “functionality” in postwar America. This work is supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wright received her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and her BA from the University of Toronto, Trinity College. She has held curatorial positions at the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, the Chipstone Foundation, and the Canadian Museum of History. Her work has been published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America, Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation (University of Delaware Press, 2021), as well as in exhibition catalogues. Wright has collaboratively curated nine exhibitions across her career, including four with the Center for Design and Material Culture.