About SOMArts

Maria Jenson is Creative and Executive Director of SOMArts Cultural Center, the 26,000-square-foot civic arts institution that has anchored San Francisco’s cultural ecosystem since 1979. Since 2016, she has built SOMArts into a launchpad for early-career artists and curators, re-establishing solo exhibitions after a long pause, creating paid opportunities for artists to develop new work, and making the cultivation of the next generation of arts and culture leaders central to the institution’s mission.

Before SOMArts, Jenson founded ArtPadSF, an independent art fair at the legendary Phoenix Hotel, and served on SFMOMA’s External Relations team through its $600M expansion. A committed arts advocate, she works at the tables where arts budgets and cultural policy are negotiated. She serves on the boards of Art + Water, SF Arts Alliance, and Arts for a Better Bay Area, sits on the steering committee for the Further Triennial, and advises SF Art Week.

A playwright and trained dancer, she was a member of Crowded Fire Theater’s 2021–23 Resilience & Development Cohort; an artist inside the very pipelines she works to strengthen.  

Amid anti-war protests and struggles to establish civil rights in the 1960s, the Neighborhood Arts Program (NAP) is created by the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) in order to provide funding for the arts beyond the city’s established arts institutions. The city purchases the Brannan Street building that becomes home to “Support Services for the Arts.”

Funding is drastically cut for the arts in California, and the organization is forced to restructure. Private funding is sought for the South of Market Cultural Center through the establishment of “Friends of Support Services for the Arts.” FSSA becomes an independent 501(c)3 organization in August 1979.

SOMArts launches the Commons Curatorial Residency program and secures critical funding support to expand its artistic programming and support of art made with, by and for cultural communities.