Thursday, May 2, 2024

Julieanna Richardson

Founder & President
The HistoryMakers

Moderator:
Paula Diperna
Author and Special Advisor to CDP

Julieanna Richardsonis the Founder and President of The HistoryMakers. Julieanna has a diverse background in theater, television production, and the cable television industry that created a unique path to founding the largest effort to record the African American experience since the WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s. Founded in 2000, The HistoryMakers is a national, 501(c)(3) non-profit educational institution headquartered in Chicago committed to preserving, developing and providing easy access to an internationally recognized, archival collection of thousands of African American video oral histories.

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Julieanna graduated from Brandeis University with a double-major in Theatre Arts and American Studies, where she did extensive oral history interviews on the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes. She worked as a corporate lawyer at the Chicago law firm of Jenner & Block prior to serving in the early 1980s as the Cable Administrator for the City of Chicago Office of Cable Communications.

Julieanna sits on the Honors Council of Lawyers for the Creative Arts; Simmons University Dean’s Advisory Council of the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities, and James Madison University’s Flowerings Advisory Council. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from Howard University, Dominican University and Brandeis University. In 2014, Black Enterprise magazine awarded Julieanna with the Legacy Award, its highest recognition of women’s achievement.

That same year, she was profiled in American Masters: The Boomer List, a PBS documentary and exhibition at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. She is a 2021 recipient of the Chicago History Museum’s John Hope Franklin Making History Award, which celebrates prominent Chicagoans who have made the city a better place to live. Published in July 2022, her TedTalk “The Mission to Safeguard Black History in the U.S.” is viewable on YouTube.