Speakers

Lolly Bowean

Program Officer, Ford Foundation

Lolly Bowean is a writer, an award-winning journalist and community storyteller. She currently manages the journalism portfolio at the Ford Foundation. Before joining Ford in 2021, Lolly managed the Media & Storytelling portfolio at the Field Foundation of Illinois. Lolly worked as a general assignment reporter at the Chicago Tribune for more than 15 years and had a particular focus on urban affairs, youth culture, housing, minority communities and government relations.

She wrote primarily about Chicago’s unique African-American community and the development of the Obama Presidential Center. She has been published in Chicago Magazine, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Lenny Letter and Longreads. She has served as a contributing instructor for the Poynter Institute and lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and is the former program officer for the Chicago Headline Club. She was a 2017 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a Studs Terkel Award winner. In 2019, she became the first African-American awarded the Gene Burd Urban Journalism Award.