Laurel Horton is a folklorist and quilt researcher. A native of Kentucky, she earned a B.A. in English and an M.S. in Library Science from the University of Kentucky, and an M.A. degree in Folklore from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her 1979 thesis "Economic Influences on German and Scotch-Irish Quilts in Antebellum Rowan County, North Carolina," was one of the earliest studies of regional variations in American quiltmaking traditions.

Between 1983 and 1985, Horton worked with the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina to conduct a survey of quilts owned in selected counties. This project resulted in a traveling exhibition and the book, Social Fabric: South Carolina's Traditional Quilts. In 1999, Horton worked with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to select and interpret materials for an internet exhibition of quilt-related collections as part of the National Digital Library. The materials include interviews and photographs of quiltmakers along the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1978, and essays (see “Blue Ridge Quiltmaking in the Late Twentieth Century”) and photographs of the winners of national quilt contests sponsored by Lands' End in the 1990s.

Laurel Horton has been an active member of the American Quilt Study Group since 1983, served on that organization's Board of Directors from 1986 to 1996, and edited Uncoverings, the group's annual volume of research papers from 1987 to 1983. She also edited Quiltmaking in America: Beyond the Myths (1994), which contains selected essays from the annual volumes. Through this international network, she has served as a mentor for many individual researchers, both academic and self-trained.

Mary Black's Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life (2006) represents a new direction for the study of historic quilts as an aspect of a family's "material behavior" (to use the term suggested by folklorist Michael Owen Jones, who contributed the foreword to this book). Laurel Horton weaves the story of the family's lives, using information gleaned from oral interviews with descendants, family papers, historic documents, and the quilts themselves.