A former Folklife Specialist in the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center for 27 years, Catherine Hiebert Kerst was trained as a folklorist and an archivist. During her multi-faceted career, she has gained significant experience in public sector cultural programming, research and presentation. Catherine received her MA in Scandinavian Studies (with a focus on Modern Danish Literature) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1974 and a PhD through the Folklife Program, American Studies Department, at George Washington University in 1989. At the American Folklife Center, she worked as an archivist and cataloger with a special interest in New Deal ethnographic archival collections, participated in educational folklife outreach activities through presentations for students and teachers, the creation of educational resources, and conducted “how to do oral histories” video conferences.

Over the years at the Library of Congress, she also contributed to scholarly publications, public presentations and reference services and helped to create online presentations on a range of topics sponsored by the American Folklife Center. Among other things, Catherine initiated the concept and creation, plus furthered the development of the AFS (American Folklore Society) Ethnographic Thesaurus. Further, she served as the Center’s coordinator of several public symposia, including Literatura de Cordel: Continuity and Change in Brazilian Popular Literature and the Cultural Heritage Archives Symposium: Network, Innovation & Collaboration (2013).

In 1995-6, Catherine was on a 16-month interagency detail from the Library of Congress to the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to serve as the Smithsonian curator of the Iowa Program for the 1996 Festival of American Folklife. During 2004, she worked part-time as a Folklife contractor for the Maryland State Arts Council’s Maryland Traditions Project, where she conducted folklife fieldwork and coordinated traditional arts programming with folklorist Steve Warrick for the Catoctin Crossroads: Folk Traditions and History in Mid-Maryland conference that generated a publication about folklife in Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties.  In 2008-9, Catherine received a Fulbright Lectureship to teach an MA Folklore course, “The Theory and Practice of Folklore Archives,” at the School of Folklore Studies, University of Calicut, Kerala, India. During the summer of 2023, Kerst coordinated “Mennonite Communal Singing Traditions” programming featured at the Smithsonian Institution’s 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program: “Creative Encounters: Living Religions in the U.S.

She has written articles and presented numerous papers at scholarly conferences on the topics of New Deal ethnography, the folk music collecting career of Sidney Robertson Cowell, Danish American traditional culture, Kuchipudi dance, impressions of Kerala culture, international adoption, and ethnographic archival description.