Episode #141 - Kris Jensen - Museum Director, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles

Episode #141 Kris Jensen - Director of the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles

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Join the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles on Saturday, August 16, 2025, for a Curator Talk with Melissa Leventon that provides insight into their current exhibition, Kay Sekimachi: Ingenuity and Imagination. RSVP.

Kris Jensen, Director of the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, has woven together a range of experiences in taking the helm of one of the Bay Area’s most niche and quietly radical museums. He has decades of nonprofit leadership experience, including as director of development at Alameda County Community Food Bank, Executive Director of Collective Roots in East Palo Alto, and Executive Director of San Bruno Mountain Watch. The same sense of advocacy and inclusion he brought to those roles now shapes Jensen’s mission at the museum.

In this conversation, Kris reflects on his path from food justice to textile arts, the importance of redefining museums as interactive spaces, and how fiber art—often dismissed as craft—has long been a vehicle for social commentary.

Follow the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles on Instagram @sjmqt and on the web at sj-mqt.org