Grace Jeffers is a member of the Vilcek Foundation’s Arts Advisory Committee. The Arts Advisory Committee works collaboratively to provide expert guidance to the foundation on the development of exhibitions and programs related to arts and culture.

Jeffers is a writer, historian, educator, and artist. Passionate about design, art, preservation, and material culture, she earned renown in design at a young age, hand-painting “wearable art” that captured the zeitgeist of the 1980s. Her enterprising spirit led to her being profiled in the Washington Post Magazine at the age of 17, in an article on young entrepreneurs. These early designs are now in museum collections. 

Her dedication to art and design and understanding of materials led her to study anthropology and fine art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at George Washington University. She earned her MA in the history of decorative arts, design, and culture at the Bard Graduate Center, where she was a pioneer in the preservation of plastics. Her thesis, Machine Made Natural: The Decorative Products of the Formica Corporation, 1947–1962, was published in 1998 and her archives were accessioned by the Archive Center at the Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1998 Jeffers made preservation history by restoring the mid-century vernacular plastic model home, The Ralph and Sunny Wilson House in Temple, Texas, which was awarded the Merit Award by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

She began working with Wilsonart International, developing 20 years of award-winning special projects, all of which demonstrated emergent design thinking. Her “Chair Design Class,” a year-ong project that was annually exhibited at the International Contemporary Design Fair, was hosted at 16 different design schools. This gave Jeffers an up-close understanding of a spectrum of educational approaches. 

Following the Wilson House, Jeffers endeavored to write an encyclopedia on materials. A prolific 440,000 words later she has an extraordinarily complex understanding of the life-cycle issues of thousands of materials. She served as an editor and contributor on The New Materials Handbook, and has authored many articles for arts and design publications on materials, sustainability, and design.

Jeffers thoroughly researches every project she undertakes and builds important connections between artifacts and culture. These qualities make her a compelling lecturer, teacher, and public speaker. She debuted her lecture Man Made Natural at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she also taught Museology and The History and Theory of Ornament. As part of her ongoing work with Wilsonart, Jeffers led the annual Wilsonart Challenges Program, teaching at 16 different schools across North America and jurying the annual Wilsonart Student Chair Design Competition. The program and competition engage young designers in the application of material to form and function, with the opportunity to have their work exhibited in industry showcases.

Her research acumen and eye for design and exhibition make Jeffers an excellent curator. She pioneered an exhibition about the computer-aided design of decorative materials, “Going Digital: Digital Manufacturing and the Emancipation of Design,” for Material ConneXion in 1999. As part of her work with interiors + sources magazine, she led the development and curated the Materials Pavilion—an interactive exhibition showcasing hundreds of surfaces and interior design materials for NeoCon, the premier commercial interior design convention—and served as a contributing curator and catalog author for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s exhibition Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design. 

Jeffers’s life was transformed in 2019 when at 51 the fit and athletic woman was unexpectedly diagnosed,  with stage 4 melanoma. She has applied to her healing the same determination, research, and commitment that have characterized her work, and has applied her skill for writing, advocacy, and connection to her new roles as a disability advocate and journalist. In 2024, she published her experience in an op-ed article for Newsweek, highlighting her extraordinary journey of recovery and the importance of self-advocacy in health care, particularly for women.