Lisa Yun Lee
Lisa Yun Lee (BA, Bryn Mawr College, PhD, Duke University) is the Executive Director of the National Public Housing Museum, a cultural activist, an Associate Professor of Public Culture and Museum Studies in the UIC School of Art & Art History, and teaching faculty with the Prison and Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville Prison. Lisa is working with public housing residents to open a museum in the last remaining building of the historic Jane Addams Homes with the mission to preserve, interpret and propel housing as a human right. The Museum will include the world’s largest collection of oral histories of people who grew up in public housing, three restored apartments from several different generations of diverse public housing families, storytelling spaces to bridge the arts and innovative public policy, an Entrepreneurship Hub that includes a social justice cooperative and museum store owned in partnership with public housing residents, and contemporary art spaces.
As the previous Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, she oversaw a renovation of one of the United States’s most important historic sites, installed a new permanent exhibition, and reinvigorated public programming. As the Director of the UIC School of Art & Art History from 2010-2017, she helped to found the Museum and Exhibition Studies Program that is committed to social justice.
Lisa served on both Mayor Brandon Johnson and Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Arts & Culture Transition Teams, and on Mayor Lightfoot’s Commission for Monuments, Memorials, and Historical Reckoning. She was recently reappointed by Governor Pritzker to the Board of the Illinois State Museum, and serves on the Boards of 3Arts, and the Field Foundation.