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 invitational, competitive, group, and one-person exhibitions. Billie Theide's work is in the permanent collections of the Muzeum w Walbrzychu in Walbrzych, Poland; Muzeum Miejskie we Wroclawiu in Wroclaw, Poland; Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC; Museum of Arts & Design in New York; de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco: Evansville Museum of Art in Indiana; Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Czech Republic; Panevezys Civic Art Gallery in Panevezys, Lithuania; Sonny and Gloria Kamm Collection in Los Angeles; and Sanford M. and Diane Besser Collection in Santa Fe. She is a Distinguished Member and Past-President of the Society of North American Goldsmiths. Billie Theide is Professor of Art and Chair of Crafts and Metal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.