Bio

Minjee Kim is a scholar of dress, fashion, and textiles based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. Born and raised in South Korea, she earned her Ph.D. from Seoul National University with a dissertation on the dress culture of the Balhae dynasty (698–926).

She has taught since 1993 across a wide range of educational settings—from community colleges to undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as public and museum-based education—in both South Korea and the United States. She is currently an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she teaches History of East Asian Dress beginning in Spring 2026.

Beyond higher education, her professional work spans scholarly publication, period costume reproduction, exhibition planning and review, object appraisal, and translation for global audiences. This breadth of experience has shaped her interdisciplinary and transnational approach to fashion history, connecting theoretical inquiry with material analysis, curatorial practice, and pedagogy. Her research interests include the historiography of Korean dress and fashion, research methodology, fashion history pedagogy, and archival practices.

She is co-editor of Dress History of Korea: Critical Perspectives on Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2023) and has extensive experience editing and translating scholarship on non-Western dress traditions for English-language audiences. She has served as Council Member and Social Media Coordinator for the Western Region of the Costume Society of America since 2018.

She joined the Tracing Patterns Foundation as a Research Associate in April 2022, and in August 2023 founded Fashion History Consulting, Inc. to expand her service to academic and cultural communities.

Read more about her story here: Korean; English