Keynote: Steven Jenkins & Mark Davidson

Closing Keynote
Friday | 8:30am

The Bob Dylan Center offers unprecedented access to the creative life of one of America’s most important and influential artists. Steven Jenkins, Director of the Bob Dylan Center/American Song Archives, and Mark Davidson, the Senior Director of Archives and Exhibitions, to discuss highlights of the Center’s first 18 months,  the art and science of collecting, sorting and preserving archival materials in the Archive, and the recent publication of Mixing Up the Medicine, which is in many ways the culmination of the archival efforts thus far.

Steven Jenkins is a thirty-year veteran of the nonprofit sector, having held leadership positions at San Francisco Bay Area organizations including University of California Press, Glide Foundation, San Francisco Film Society/San Francisco International Film Festival, Frameline/San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, Film Arts Foundation, and the Ansel Adams Center for Photography. Jenkins served as Editor-in-Chief of Artweek and Bay Area Citysearch; Senior Editor of see: a journal of visual culture; and has contributed hundreds of articles on visual arts, music, film, literature and culture to national publications including New York, Out, California, Detour, SF Camerawork, and Publishers Weekly. His books as a writer and editor include City Slivers and Fresh Kills: The Films of Gordon Matta-Clark and Model Culture: James Casebere: Photographs.  As a curatorial and development consultant he has guided programming and fundraising efforts for a wide variety of nonprofits and independent artists. Jenkins earned a B.A. in English at UC Berkeley and an M.A. in English at San Francisco State University.

Mark Davidson is Senior Director of Archives and Exhibitions for the Bob Dylan Center and Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in musicology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MSIS in archiving and library science from the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation, titled “Recording the Nation: Folk Music and the Government in Roosevelt’s New Deal, 1936–1941,” explored folk music collecting under the Works Progress Administration. Mark is co-author and co-editor of Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine (Callaway, 2023).