About Lauren Deutsch

Born and raised on Chicago’s south side, I attended Columbia College in the mid 70s and served as Artistic Director of Photography for the City’s Artist in Residence program later that decade.   In the early 80s I joined the Board of Directors of the Jazz Institute of Chicago and served in that capacity for 14 years.  As a board member I helped produce and promote special projects, helped program the Chicago Jazz Festival, helped develop a high school jazz curriculum and negotiated a home for the Jazz Institute of Chicago's archives at the University of Chicago.

I began my tenure as Executive Director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago in 1996, and ended it in 2018. My background in community organizing and the arts provided the context in developing programs in collaboration with a variety of small and large institutions. These included the JazzCity program, a collaboration with the Chicago Park District which provides access to high caliber jazz performances to communities all over Chicago; the Jazz Links teacher-partnership that provides in-school residencies and after school opportunities for students to perform with and learn from jazz veterans; and in partnership with the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the conception and programming of Millennium Park's Made in Chicago: World Class Jazz concert series.

In 2006 I began a partnership with Estrada Poznanska, a cultural arts organization in Poznan, Poland to program and present a 6-concert Made in Chicago Festival and was commissioned to create and exhibit my music-inspired artwork. The festival and partnership continued for twelve years, and helped introduce many musicians from Chicago to audiences in Europe.

In 2004 I was selected as one of the Chicago Tribune's Chicagoans of the Year for my contributions to Chicago's cultural landscape.  In 2015 my work was included in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Freedom Principle,” an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and a retrospective “Lauren Deutsch: A Musical Metamorphosis: Photographs from 1979-2015” was mounted at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center.