The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company (MJDC) was founded in San Francisco in 1973. Margaret Jenkins herself is a fifth-generation San Franciscan, steeped in its particular cultural and artistic traditions. Yet the origins of the company's singular artistic philosophy can undoubtedly be found among the radical developments that took place in all the arts in the New York of the 1960’s.

While studying and working with Merce Cunningham during that time, Jenkins began to reimagine the concepts of both choreographer and dance company. It was in the environment of Cunningham and John Cage that she was first exposed to the collaborative efforts of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and many others, as well as to the music of Earle Brown, Gordon Mumma, Morton Feldman and Cage himself.

Brief mention must also be made of the revolutionary experimental dance environment centered around the Judson Dance Theater at that time, with artists such as Judith and Robert Dunn, David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown interacting with Rauschenberg, Robert Morris and many others. Here the limits of dance were radically reinterpreted, and its language dramatically expanded for the generations to come.

Jenkins returned to San Francisco in 1970 and immediately began to teach and make works prior to the formal founding of her Company three years later. Her goal was less to create a choreographic entity in the traditional sense than to fashion a fluid site for exploratory, collaborative interaction among all the arts, a place of "company" in its deepest meaning.

The MJDC began touring extensively in the late 1970s. During the NEA’s National Dance Touring Program, the Company traveled throughout the United States on a regular basis. The Company has also traveled internationally in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as Asia. Dances have been commissioned by a long list of presenters, including BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), the Krannert Center in Urbana, IL, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Lee, MA, Cal Performances in Berkeley, CA, Arizona State University and University of Arizona, AZ, and on a number of occasions by Dance Center of Columbia College and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL.

The dancers have been critical to the development of this highly physical and gestural world that is her signature. The Company creates dances by continually layering, disrupting rhythms and shattering spatial planes. There is a loose and brazen quality to their explorations, with an abundance of information offered through movement, music and spoken text. Jenkins has continued to emphasize this focus across her entire career, welcoming the participation of such multi-disciplinary artists as Rinde Eckert, Bruce Nauman, Terry Allen and Yoko Ono, and composers Paul Dresher, Jay Cloidt, Bill Fontana, Alvin Curran, David Lang, among others.

She has worked with path-breaking and now widely celebrated Bay Area musical groups such as the Kronos Quartet, the Rova Saxophone Quartet and the Dresher Ensemble, and throughout the thirty year history of the Company has engaged in multiple collaborations with the poet Michael Palmer. Choreographer and dancer Ellie Klopp played an invaluable role in shaping the work for more than ten years as associate artistic director. Set, lighting and costume designers including Alexander Nichols, Sara Linnie Slocum, and Sandra Woodall have performed essential roles in the creation of many of these works.

In April of 2003, many present and former collaborators and performers gathered along with the public for a series of evenings celebrating three decades working together at what Dance Magazine has called “the most bracing dance to come out of the West in years.”

In the summer of 2004, the MJDC opened a new studio in San Francisco. The Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab (MJDL) is the home of all MJDC creative activities and provides the community with a vital space for new types of exchange. No other space in San Francisco can afford to devote its entire day to creative research, open rehearsals, and free lectures and demonstrations of interdisciplinary work, uninterrupted by “training” classes or the daily array of demanding activities of a resident company/space-owner. The particular emphasis of this space and for the MJDC is to create programs and interactions among choreographers that emphasize process not product.

Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME), one of many MJDC programs, launched its second year in July 2005. CHIME is an artist-driven mentorship program in which self-selected pairs of professional modern dance choreographers—mentor and mentee—receive significant financial support over one year to establish and explore a working relationship that includes, but is not limited to, work in the studio.

In 2005, MJDC created a site-specific work for the Osher Sculpture Garden, which was unveiled during the opening ceremonies of the new de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. MJDC activities have also included activities and commissions in foreign countries. In 2003, Jenkins went to Kolkata, India to make a work for the Tanusree Shankar Dance Company in a residency supported by the US State Department. Jenkins was invited to China in 2004 to conduct workshops for modern dance companies in Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Beijing. In 2005 and 2006, MJDC collaborated with Indian dancers from Kolkata, on the cross-cultural work, A Slipping Glimpse, which premiered in May 2006 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.