Kris Kiesling became Director of Archives Special Collections at the University of Minnesota in 2005. Prior to that appointment, she was Associate Director for Technical and Digital Services at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, and Head of the Department of Manuscripts and Archives before then. Kiesling has been involved in descriptive standards initiatives since 1990, serving on the Standards Committee and the Committee on Archival Information Exchange of the Society of American Archivists, and as chair of the SAA Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Working Group since 1995. She is a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. She received her MILS from the University of Michigan in 1988.