Kerstin Ekengren, born Kerstin Ulla Margareta Holm in 1917, grew up at Saltsjöbaden in the Stockholm archipelago. She finished her training in 1940 and went to work for Astrid Sampe at NK:s Textilkammare, the textile department of Nordiska Kompaniet. In 1944 she married the painter and sculptor Sture Ekengren.
In 1956 the couple built a modern house in a village outside Järvsö, in Gävleborg county, and it was from there that her best known work came: through the 1960s she was admired above all for doubleweaves, carefully composed and finely made. Her pile carpets of around 1950 are dense and soft underfoot, meant to be used. A rug of 1961, Cavalleria Rustica, is signed KE beside the mark of the Järvsö workshop. In 1968 she answered the massacre at My Lai with an openly woven doubleweave tapestry made in its memory.
