Lakeview Day 2025

Join us for a day full of programming on April 27 at the historic Athenaeum Center, located in the Belmont Theater District — home to over 20 theaters in the Lakeview neighborhood. We partner with Chicago’s oldest continuously operating Off-Loop theater to present programming focused on our current political climate and how we move forward.

Best-selling author and New Yorker writer Jonathan Blitzer discusses the crisis on the southern border; acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson illustrates a way out of political division; philosopher and UChicago professor Agnes Callard helps us rediscover how to ask life’s most important questions; award-winning literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn brings us closer to the original work of The Odyssey through his newest translation; Chicago’s own Borderless Studio and On the Real Film explore the 2013 Chicago school closures — the largest in in U.S. history; Tonika Lewis Johnson discusses housing segregation in Chicago; New York Times bestselling author Timothy Snyder highlights why freedom is our only chance for survival; and dance group Upshtat Zingerai brings Yiddish grooves and the liberatory joy of klezmer music.