John Russick

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About

As Senior Vice President, John Russick oversees the departments of Exhibitions, Education, Publications, Collections and Curatorial Affairs, Information Technology, and the Research Center on behalf of the Museum. Since arriving in 1998, he has led the development of a host of temporary and permanent exhibitions and a collection of digital experiences for the Museum. Russick’s latest digital initiative, the Chicago 00 Project, is produced in partnership with filmmaker Geoffrey Alan Rhodes. The interactive augmented and virtual reality experiences showcase the Museum’s film, photo, and sound archive and won a MUSE award in 2018 and a Chicago Innovation award in 2019. Most recently, Russick’s article, “The Museum Inside Out,” was published in the January/February 2020 issue of the American Alliance of Museums’ Museum Magazine. Other publications include “A Place for Everything: Museum Collections, Technology, and the Power of Place,” published on Medium in 2014 as part of the CODE-WORDS project; Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions (Left Coast Press, 2010); a chapter in Sports in Chicago, edited by Elliott J. Gorn (University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Historic Photos of Chicago Crime: The Capone Era (Turner Publishing, 2007), which features nearly 200 images from the Chicago History Museum’s photography collection. Russick served as a consultant on the 2011 Florentine Films documentary, Prohibition, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Since 2008 he has organized the American Association of Museum’s annual Excellence in Exhibition Label Writing Competition. Among many other contributions to our organization and to the museum field, Russick served as vice chair for the Museum’s Visioning Committee, chair of the Digital Future Committee, and chair of the Anti-Racism Task Force. He has won awards for both his preservation and exhibition work.

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