Born in 1941 in Fort Morgan, Colorado, Pat Hickman is a fiber artist and educator known for creating sculptural installations using natural materials including gut and sinew. She manipulates these materials in a variety of ways, sometimes stretching them over basket-like forms or knotting them into abstracted nets. Hickman’s interest in fiber began after completing her BA at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1962, while she was living and teaching English in Turkey. She took her first weaving classes at the Applied Fine Art Academy in Istanbul. Back in the United States, she decided to pursue her MA in textile design at the University of California, Berkeley (1977). Hickman became interested in working with animal entrails after a research trip to Alaska, where she observed Yup’ik Eskimo makers fabricating waterproof parkas using seal intestine and fish skin. Hickman taught for nearly a decade at schools around Northern California before accepting a position at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu (1990). She retired in 2006, and she relocated to the Hudson River Valley in New York, where she maintains a studio. Hickman has mounted solo exhibitions around the country and has been collected by a number of institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Denver Art Museum in Colorado. She has received several awards, most notably two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1986 and 1994). Hickman was elected a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 2005.