Lisa Yun Lee (BA, Bryn Mawr College, Ph.D., Duke University) is a cultural activist and the Director of the National Public Housing Museum. She has served as the Director of the UIC School of Art & Art History where she is an Associate Professor of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies. She was most recently the 2017 Co-Curator of Open Engagement. As the previous Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, she oversaw a renovation of the house, installed a new permanent exhibition, and reinvigorated public programming at one of our nation’s most important historic sites. Lisa is also the co-founder of The Public Square at the Illinois Humanities Council, an organization dedicated to creating spaces for dialogue and dissent and for reinvigorating civil society. She writes broadly about arts, culture, diversity, and aesthetics and politics, and has written a book entitled Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of Theodor Adorno (Routledge, 2004), and also wrote the survey essay for the first comprehensive monograph of Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates (Phaidon, 2015). She serves on the boards of the American Alliance of Museums, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, 3Arts, and the Rebuild Foundation.
