Billie Theide holds a MFA from Indiana University in Bloomington and a BFA from Drake University in Des Moines. She is the recipient of a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and five Artists Fellowship Grants from the Illinois Arts Council. Her creative work has been included in over four hundred fifty invitational, competitive, group, and one-person exhibitions. Billie Theide's work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco in California; Museum of Arts & Design in New York; the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; Evansville Museum of Art in Indiana; Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Czech Republic; National Museum in Wrocław, Poland; Porcelain Museum in Riga, Latvia; Civic Art Gallery in Panevėžys, Lithuania; Sonny and Gloria Kamm Collection in Los Angeles; Sanford M. and Diane Besser Collection in Santa Fe, David Charak Collection at the Racine Art Museum in Racine, Wisconsin; and the Karen and Michael Rotenberg Collection in Boston, Massachusettes. She is a Distinguished Member and Past-President of the Society of North American Goldsmiths. Billie Theide is Professor Emerita of Art in the School of Art + Design and the Inaugural James Avery Endowed Chair in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.