Minjee Kim is a historian and lecturer specializing in Korean dress and textile history, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Born and raised in South Korea, she received her Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Doctorate from Seoul National University, with a doctoral dissertation on the “Dress History of the Balhae Dynasty (698-926).”

From 1993 to 1998, Minjee served as a full-time lecturer in the Department of Fashion Design at Jeonju Kijeon College, and from 1996 to 2000 as adjunct faculty at Seoul National University. She also consulted as a costume historian for exhibitions at the War Memorial of Korea (1998), the Seoul National University Museum, and the National Folk Museum (2000).

After moving to the United States in 2000, Minjee resumed her career in 2013 with a lecture series co-hosted by the Korean Cultural Center and the J. Paul Getty Museum, and has since been invited to present by institutions including UCLA, the Bard Graduate Center, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Chapman University, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Minjee holds that Korean dress, fashion, and textile history remain comparatively underexplored in the U.S. relative to other Asian countries, even as interest has grown exponentially among younger generations amid the rise of Korean popular culture in the digital era. As Korean culture moves beyond national boundaries, she believes primary sources should be opened to global researchers to reconsider and re-evaluate their meaning within the broader scope of history — a perspective she now brings to her role as a research associate with the Tracing Patterns Foundation.