Patti Gibbons

Patti Gibbons has been long involved with kite ethnography, interviewing noted kitefliers for the World Kite Museum’s oral history archive program since 1995, and writing articles about kiting since 1996. Her work was first published in American Kite Magazine, and since 2002, her column "Voices from the Vault" has run in Kiting: The Journal of the American Kiteflier. In 2019 she published The Modern Kiteflier, and looks at the sometimes quirky lives of prominent kitefliers. Additionally, Gibbons publishes in the fields of library science and cultural heritage collection preservation. Gibbons graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in anthropology, and went on to pursue career paths in archives, museums, and rare book librarianship. She holds masters degrees in museum studies from the University of Washington and in library and information science from the University of Illinois.