Lisa Yun Lee (BA, Bryn Mawr College, PhD, Duke University) is the Executive Director of the National Public Housing Museum, a cultural activist, and an Associate Professor of Public Culture and Museum Studies in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago, and teaches classes at Stateville Prison as teaching faculty with the Prison and Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.
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 that includes an installation about the history of segregation by Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor and Manual Cinema, storytelling and exhibit spaces to bridge the arts, culture and innovative public policy, a record room that is co-curated with DJ Spinderella to celebrate and explore the contributions of musicians who lived in public housing, an Entrepreneurship Hub that includes a social justice cooperative and museum store owned in partnership with public housing residents, and outdoor and indoor art installations by Edgar Miller, Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous, Mama Dorothy Burge, Andrea Carlson, and Marisa Moran Jahn.