We had a chance to interview Bob Dylan Center director Steven Jenkins recently.
In first grade, Steven Jenkins was already “heavily into” The Beatles and The Beach Boys when he discovered Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume 1 in his mother’s record collection.
“I didn’t understand the songs back then, but I was captivated by Dylan’s voice and by the colorful and iconic Milton Glaser poster that was included with the album,” says Jenkins, who became a lifelong, “occasionally obsessed” fan of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter.
Jenkins, who worked in the nonprofit arts sector for 35 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, never thought he would move to Tulsa, Okla., to feed that obsession, or that he would become the leader of the center that is responsible for housing Dylan’s vast archives.
“I had never been to Tulsa, although I’d always been intrigued by the town because of the S.E. Hinton books — The Outsiders and especially Rumble Fish — that I’d read as a teenager,” Jenkins says during a Zoom call. “When I heard about the acquisition of the Dylan archive, I thought, ‘Whenever this opens, I’ll finally make it out to Tulsa.”
Through a mutual connection during the pandemic, Jenkins met Steve Higgins, managing director of the American Song Archives, which oversees the Dylan and Woody Guthrie Archives. Soon he started sharing his ideas about what a director of the Bob Dylan Center “might need and want and could do,” and finally decided to apply for the job.
During an interview earlier this year, Jenkins discussed his role as the senior director of the Bob Dylan Center, which opened in May 2022 and has seen a spike in awareness and attendance since the release of the Academy Award-nominated film “A Complete Unknown” last year. The biopic, which looks at Dylan’s early years and relationship with Guthrie prior to “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, grossed more than $140 million worldwide.
The center, located in the Tulsa Arts District down the street from a separate facility that honors Guthrie, has sponsored a series of multi-artist themed concerts devoted to iconic Dylan albums such as Blood on the Tracks and has announced plans for another in February 2026 devoted to Blonde on Blonde. The center also has a “Going Electric” exhibit focused on 1965, the year of that Newport Folk Festival show, that is running through March 2026.
Here are excerpts from our interview, in which Jenkins discusses his work at the center and his devotion to Dylan, who he calls an “exemplar of fearless creativity.” The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Americana Highways: The Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center (which opened in 2013) are separate entities under the same umbrella. What do you do in your role?
Steven Jenkins: It’s lots of different things, from helping to oversee daily operations, some management of staff, and working with the executive team on curating andprogramming live events such as concerts, film screenings, and conversations with writers. I’m also working on education programs and helping to set the long-term goals for the organization. We’re always asking ourselves, “Where do we want to be?”
I’m always working to make connections. And, like all nonprofit organizations in this day and age, I’m working with our fundraising team. We rely on the partnership of our members and donors, so working with and for them is a big part of my job too.
AH: Like you, I had never been to Tulsa, so visiting the center when I was there was important. As a Dylan fan, walking in for the first time was a holy grail moment for me, but as the self-guided tour progressed, I also found it fascinating to watch how others were reacting to what they were seeing.
SJ: One of the most gratifying parts of the job is seeing who comes in on any given day, really from all around the world. And they’re all often very eager to tell their stories of their point of entry into Dylan. “I was at that show,” or pointing to something that’s on display, or “I came to him later.”
We talk a lot about skimmers, swimmers, and divers. Skimmers are the folks who are taking in some of the highlights, who might be more casual fans, and that’s great. I hope there’s a lot for them here that’s surprising and they see Dylan and his creativity differently.
The swimmers are really doing laps in the in the galleries, going back and forth and making sure they’re seeing everything. The divers really are getting all down into those deep layers of information. On the archive wall on the Second Floor, you’ve got the hundred plus objects and our cabinet of curiosities. With the touch screens, you can choose to go deep into each and every one of those items and learn more. There are hours and hours of additional audio and video and all the rest of it.
AH: You’ve been on the road quite a bit this year screening the documentary, “Fifty Years in Sixty Minutes.” Tell me a little more about that.
SJ: When you were here, you saw some of the rare Dylan film footage we have of him on stage and in the studio over the decades. We thought until we are ready to bring entire exhibitions to other institutions, having a film program is one way to share what we are doing and hopefully entice people to come to Tulsa or to become members of the center, or both.
By the end of 2025, I’ll have done 25 to 30 screenings of a one-hour film program in different cities. Often I’ll invite, musicians, writers, and other folks to take part in that program, a post screening discussion and a performance.
Taking the show on the road in that way is very much part of being the center’s director. I’m making sure I’m out there meeting with people, talking to our members, bringing more people into our orbit, and serving as an ambassador for our mission and programs.
AH: What sort of boost did you get from “A Complete Unknown”?
SJ: We saw an immediate spike in attendance. This is a big pop culture moment for Dylan, and it was a big hit, so it drew a lot of people to the center. What’s great to see is a lot of younger viewers and visitors who came in because of it.
Although the classic demographic is aging, and I count myself as part of that, you still see younger people at Dylan concerts. I think it’s a lot of parents and grandparents bringing their kids and grandkids to the shows. He also has a sense of perpetual cool and iconoclasm that draws younger listeners who discover him because he’s namechecked by the contemporaries they’re listening to.
AH: What are your plans for the future?
There’s a pretty compelling story that’s being told here just on one block in Tulsa’s Arts District. I want to do everything I can with my colleagues to bring more people here, get people excited about Guthrie and Dylan as cultural figures. If we can get them to look at social justice on the Guthrie side and the boundless creativity on the Dylan side, then through those lenses, we can expand on what we do in a way that hopefully resonates far beyond their monumental bodies of work.
In addition to the permanent collection, we’ll continue to have two or three rotating shows a year, such as the Jesse Ed Davis show and the Going Electric exhibits this year. We have numerous things in the works for 2026, 2027, and beyond. And then it’s the public programs — the film screenings that we’re taking out on the road, and things here that hopefully will entice people to come to Tulsa.
We’re looking at more multiple artist concerts, as we did with the “Blood on the Tracks” anniversary or the “Going Electric” exhibit, or the tribute show to Jesse Ed Davis. We’ve presented shows by The Pretenders and The Baseball Project, people who we love and who are great. But I think what we can do to make something really special is mixing and blending different artists to see how they interpret the Dylan songbook.
It’s part of looking at how Dylan approaches his songwriting, which we really try to focus on here. How does an artist approach covering a Dylan song? What are the creative decisions that go into that? It can be a daunting process for a lot of artists to take on these songs, even though he’s possibly the most covered musician we have.
And finally, we want to do more to serve K-12 students, thousands of whom come each year for field trips to both the Dylan and Guthrie centers. We can create curriculum and materials that I would love to see in classrooms, not just in Oklahoma, but in other states as well. We’ve been piloting different programs here, such as “Tangled Up in Tunes,” for which we have instrument tutorials in classes and after-school programs where we’re teaching guitar, harmonica and songwriting to kids. That’s very important to us.
Of course, it’s crucial to keep up the fundraising and partner with philanthropists that share our vision of what the center can continue to be, but after three years, I really think we’re really hitting our stride.
Thanks very much for chatting with us, Steven Jenkins. You can find more information on The Bob Dylan Center and its goings on, here: https://bobdylancenter.com
Enjoy some of our previous coverage here: Show Review: Bob Dylan in Tulsa