Lisa Yun Lee
Board Member
Lisa Yun Lee is a cultural activist and the Executive Director of the National Public Housing Museum. Lee is a vigorous champion of the arts and a supporter of free and civil discourse, recognizing their power to build and sustain a strong, just society. Lee 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.
Lee was most recently the 2017 Co-Curator of Open Engagement, an arts conference based at the University of Illinois Chicago. As the previous Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Lee oversaw a renovation of the house, installed a new permanent exhibition, and reinvigorated public programming at one of the nation’s most important historic sites. Lee was 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). Lee serves on the boards of the American Alliance of Museums, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and 3Arts.
