Moderator

Participants

• 
  Anthony Fleming III

  Panelist

  Anthony Fleming III is the narrator of The Great Chicago Fire, and a Lookingglass Theatre ensemble member. Anthony is a Chicago-based stage, film, TV actor and voiceover artist, who joined the Ensemble in 2013. His Lookingglass credits include: Moby Dick, Big Lake Big City, Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting, Fedra: Queen of Haiti, The Arabian Nights, 1984, Icarus, Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Race, and 555 performances of Lookingglass Alice. Other Chicago theatre credits include: Camino Real (Goodman Theatre), Division St: America and The Glass Menagerie (Steppenwolf Theatre Company), Jitney and Fences (Court Theatre), Hambone, Free Man Of Color, and Denmark (Jeff Nomination for Best Actor, Victory Gardens Theater), Journal of Ordinary Thought and Cut Flowers (Chicago Theatre Company), Orlando (Piven Theatre), and The Cider House Rules (Famous Door Theatre).

• 
  Dan Protess

  Panelist

  Dan Protess is the Executive Producer of Chicago Stories. He also serves as the Executive Producer of Firsthand, a yearly WTTW initiative that tackles social issues such as poverty, gun violence, and the coronavirus pandemic. He recently wrote and produced a half hour documentary about Chicago mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot, in addition to his award-winning series Urban Nature, which explores how nature is thriving in American cities. Dan served the Executive Producer, Producer, and Writer of the PBS primetime history series 10 that Changed America.

• 
  Peter Marks

  Panelist

  Peter Marks wrote and produced The Great Chicago Fire. With over two decades of experience in non-fiction television, Peter’s work has appeared on PBS, A&E, History, Discovery and Travel Channel. He graduated with a degree in American history from Stanford University and earned an MFA from USC’s Graduate Screenwriting Program.

• 
  Julius Jones

  Panelist

  Julius Jones is an Assistant Curator at the Chicago History Museum, who is currently curating a new exhibit on the Great Chicago Fire. Julius is committed to using technology to tell new and inclusive stories about the past in compelling and innovative ways. Julius develops exhibition content, conducts research, seeks new acquisitions, and speaks on a variety of Chicago history topics. Previously, he served as the Digital Content Manager, where he helped to bring the work of the museum’s Education, Curatorial, Research & Access, Publications, and Collections departments into the digital sphere. Prior to joining CHM’s staff Julius was the Digital Curator at the DuSable Museum of African American History. In this role, Julius managed Freedom’s Journey: An Online Experience of Freedom, Resistance and the Journey Towards Equality, a multi-platform effort that creates spaces (both physical and digital) for people to respond to and participate with the museum’s exhibitions.

• 
  Dr. Liesl Olson

  Panelist

  Dr. Liesl Olson is the director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library. Her books include Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford, 2009) and Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (Yale, 2017), which won the 2018 Pegasus Award from the Poetry Foundation for the best book of poetry criticism, and the 2019 Mid-America Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. Olson received, with three of her Newberry colleagues, the 2020 Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History for the year-long set of programs Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots. Olson graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University and received her doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

• 
  Ellen Skerrett

  Panelist

  Ellen Skerrett is an historian of Chicago and its neighborhoods with a special interest in Irish America. She is currently writing a history of St. Ignatius College Prep for the school’s 150th anniversary, 2019-2020. Skerrett has been the Chicago-based researcher for the Jane Addams Papers Project at Ramapo College of New Jersey, directed by Dr. Cathy Moran Hajo, and she previously worked with Mary Lynn Bryan on volumes two and three of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 1881-1900 (University of Illinois Press). From 2000 to 2003, Skerrett served as project coordinator and associate editor of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s web site, “Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963.”