When Jensen first became interested in glass, she began to create stained glass panels. She eventually recognized that painting would be less restrictive. Her early work features skeletons and fire, According to Nancy Bless, Jensen's works "lie somewhere between a collage and a collection." Jensen is involved in a project replacing glass paintings, destroyed in an earthquake, in a 19th-century Buddhist temple in northwestern Thailand. These will depict the Vessantara and Siddhartha incarnations of Buddha. She was awarded a grant from the James H.W. Thompson Foundation in Bangkok in support of the project. Jensen has exhibited widely. Solo venues include eight exhibits with New York's Heller Gallery; the Galveston Arts Center; and the Houston Center for Contemporary Crafts. Group exhibitions include
Glass Today: American Studio Glass from Cleveland Collections,
Cleveland Museum of Art, 1997;
Pilchuck Exhibition, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, 1996–1997; Gerald Peters Gallery in New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Atlanta's High Museum;
Tell Me a Story: Narrative Art in Clay and Glass, Eighth Triennale India, New Delhi, 1993;
International Exposition of Sculpture Objects, and Functional Art: SOFA Chicago, 1996;
Selections from The Chodorkoff Collection,
The Detroit Institute of Arts, MI, 1991; and
World Glass Now,
Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art,
Sapporo, Japan, 1994. A National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship recipient (1986), Jensen's works are in numerous public and private collections, including the
Royal Ontario Museum, the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
The Corning Museum of Glass, McDonald's Corporate Art Collection, and the Washington Art Consortium. For eight years, Judy Jensen worked almost exclusively on commissions. ==Museum and public collections==