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Valerie Hector is an American jewelry designer and the author of The Art of Beadwork: Historic Inspiration, Contemporary Design (ISBN 0-8230-0307-8) and co-editor of the Proceedings of the International Conference on Beads and Beadwork (ISBN 978-975-8919-32-1).

Background
Born 1960 in Evanston, IL, Hector graduated from Loyola University of Chicago in 1981 with a major in English literature. From 1983-85, she pursued graduate studies in anthropology at The University of Chicago. She spent the summer of 1984 in the town of Mani, Yucatan, where she lived with a local family in a traditional Mayan home while learning to speak Yucatec Maya.

In January 1988 Hector left academia to open her first jewelry design studio in Chicago, IL. Since then she has exhibited her work at numerous juried American craft shows and received many awards. Her work has been featured in American Craft, Metalsmith, Ornament, Smithsonian and other publications, and in The History of Beads from 100,000 BC to the Present (see below). She is the recipient of two United States patents (6,378,334 B1; 5,590,546).

In 1998 Hector moved her studio to Evanston, IL, where she currently resides.