Liesl Olson
Nonfiction
Chicago, IL
Liesl Olson is the Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. She is the author of Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford, 2009), Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (Yale, 2017), and forthcoming “Now We See the World Together: Five Midwesterners and the Revolution of Modern Art” (Norton, 2025). Before arriving at Hull-House, she directed the Program in Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library, where in 2021 she curated “Chicago Avant-Garde” and produced its accompanying catalog. With three of her Newberry colleagues, Olson was awarded the 2020 Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History for Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots. Liesl holds strong opinions about poetry, and despite her proclivity for impossible shoes, she loves to go camping.