Born in 1949 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Michael James is an artist and educator whose collage-like quilts evoke fluid psychological landscapes. The oldest of seven children, James grew up drawing with his younger siblings for entertainment and was committed to studying art by high school. He enrolled at Southeastern Massachusetts University, now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and completed his BFA in 1971 with a concentration in painting and minor in printmaking. James continued his studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, earning his MFA in 1973. While a graduate student at RIT, James worked as a ceramics assistant in its School of American Crafts and became interested in craft associated mediums. James began making quilts in the early '70s, soon after the birth of his son Trevor. Drawn to the medium for its ubiquity and close connection to the human body, he would spend the next 25 years self-employed as an artist, teaching quilting workshops and producing his own work. One of the few people creating non-traditional quilts in the 1970s and '80s, James was sometimes met with skepticism or hostility from quilters rooted in the heritage of the art form, but ultimately gained a following. In 2005, he accepted a position teaching at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he remains their Ardis James professor and chairs the department of textiles, merchandising, and fashion design. James has published several primers on patchwork quilting over the years and exhibited widely. In a move away from earlier, densely patterned geometric works, James recently began incorporating photographic images into his quilts using digital-printing technology. His work is represented within a number of permanent museum collections, including that of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. He was honored with the 2015 Master of the Medium Award in textiles from the James Renwick Alliance and was selected to complete an oral history interview for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art in 2003. Michael James was elected a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 2001.