Vanessa Jennings height - How tall is Vanessa Jennings?

As of 2017, she is believed to be the last active Kiowa cradleboard maker on the Southern Plains.

In 2004, she was named the Honored One by the Red Earth Festival, which is the highest honor bestowed upon an artist by the festival.

One of Jennings' cradleboards was included in a national traveling exhibition titled "Gifts of Pride and Love" that featured 38 cradles from various Native American tribal traditions. The exhibit also emphasized female artists, who have long been overlooked by histories focusing on the male Indian warrior culture. The exhibition began in December 1999 at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and included stops at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the Fowler Museum of Cultural History in Los Angeles, California, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman, Oklahoma, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Ledyard, Connecticut. Jennings wrote a chapter titled "Why I Make Cradles" in the catalog book that accompanied the exhibition.

She has earned multiple awards in various categories at the Santa Fe Indian Market, including in 1997, 2003, 2010, and 2016.

In 1996, Jennings and her artwork were honored in a Plains Indian Seminar sponsored by the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, titled "Powerful Expressions: Art of Plains Indian Women". The seminar's keynote address noted that "the way Vanessa lives epitomizes the best kinds of values and virtues of Plains Indian women".

In 1995, Jennings helped organize an exhibit titled "Four Generations: Mopope, Palmer, Jennings, and Morgan" at the Red Earth Indian Center in Oklahoma City. The exhibit featured the work of eight Kiowa artisans from Jennings' family, starting with her grandfather Stephen Mopope, to represent an unbroken line of artistic tradition.

In 1992, Jennings (then-Morgan) reproduced a small version of the "Tepee With Battle Pictures" for an exhibit at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. The original painted tepee was created in 1845 to commemorate the continued peace agreement between the Kiowa and Cheyenne tribes, and was presented as a gift to Little Bluff, the principal chief of the Kiowa. The tepee represented an object of great cultural significance and prestige, and has been reproduced several times over the years. Jennings is a great-great-great-granddaughter of Little Bluff II. For her reproduced model, Jennings drew upon family history to depict military deeds, but because Kiowa tradition is that only men can reproduce such images, Jennings taught her son Seth to draw the battle pictures on the tepee.

In 1992, she received the Red Earth Festival President's Award.

Jennings is a recipient of a 1989 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. That honor also includes recognition as a Living National Treasure by the US President and Congress.

At the inaugural Red Earth Festival in 1987, Jennings won prizes for her antelope headdress and a mountain lion bow case.

Jennings had made artwork in her spare time, but in the early 1980s she received a commission from the Museum of International Folk Art to make a ceremonial child's dress using traditional Kiowa beadwork on rawhide. Jennings acknowledges that this commission marked the beginning of her professional career as a traditional Southern Plains artist.

Vanessa Paukeigope Santos Jennings (born October 5, 1952) is a Kiowa/Kiowa Apache/Gila River Pima regalia maker, clothing designer, cradleboard maker, and beadwork artist from Oklahoma.

Jennings lives in Red Stone, east of Fort Cobb, Oklahoma. She had three children from her first marriage. Because her parents died in the 1950s, she was unable to follow the Kiowa tradition of having the grandparents directly raise their grandchildren, so Jennings raised her three children by herself. She married Carl Jennings in 1993. As of 2004, she had four grandchildren, and she also raised her sister's eight children following her death.