Scholar, curator of glass, and the 2014 American Craft Council Honorary Fellow, Tina Oldknow was born in 1955 in Los Angeles. She received her BA in art history from the University of Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978 and her MA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 1982. Oldknow landed her first position as assistant curator in the department of decorative arts and european sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1982, where she stayed in different capacities and different departments through much of the 1980s. Moving to Seattle with her husband, Oldknow was exposed to more contemporary art, and in her own words, her “defection from ancient art” was complete when she was hired to do a book on Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. From 1996 to 2001, Oldknow was the editor of Glass Art Society Journal, and from 2000 to 2015 she was curator of modern glass at the Corning Museum of Glass, attaining the title of senior curator in 2014 until her retirement in 2015. Oldknow was extensively involved in the redesign of the modern and contemporary glass galleries at Corning and has curated such exhibitions as: "The Masters of Studio Glass," "Curiosities of Glassmaking," "Design in an Age of Adversity: Czech Glass 1945 – 1980," and "Making Ideas: Experiments in Design at GlassLab."