Get to know the work of a different Chicago-based thought leader each month during MCA’s Culture Catalyst series.

Michael C. Dorf is a partner in the Chicago law firm Adducci, Dorf, Lehner, Mitchell & Blankenship, P.C., and adjunct full professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the mid 1980s, he directed the creation of Chicago’s first cultural plan during the administration of Mayor Harold Washington. He has  served as special counsel to the late congressman Sidney R. Yates, formulating policies for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other federal cultural organizations. He also acted as legal affairs consultant to the presidentially appointed independent commission reviewing the policies of the NEA during the 1990s and was a co-convenor of President Obama’s Arts Policy Task Force during the 2008 presidential campaign. Michael is a member of the board of Arts Alliance Illinois, the Illinois Humanities Council, and the Illinois Community College Board. In conjunction with MCA’s exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, Michael speaks about his cultural experiences in Chicago during that decade and addresses the renewed interest in a Chicago Cultural Plan today.