Jill Riddell

Host

Jill Riddell was born in Liberty, Texas almost on the Fourth of July. The daughter of a geologist father and English teacher mother, she combined her parents’ talents and became a science writer. She lives in a 120-year old house in Chicago with her husband, two young daughters, a dog, a lizard and 60,000 honeybees. The house is her second green renovation; in both, she had to balance historic integrity with sustainability. She composts with enthusiasm, grows her own vegetables, putters in the prairie garden, is having an energy audit done, and frequently muses that she really should hook up that rain barrel to the gutter instead of just letting it sit unused by the fence. Though she does drive a Prius, she drives it with far too much pleasure to be able to feel holier than thou about it. For over twenty years, she’s been living as green as possible, sometimes achieving admirable levels of success, and sometimes—well, sometimes not so perfect.

Jill is the Vice President of Exhibits and Strategic Initiatives at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum where she works to connect the Museum and its programs and projects to the regional conservation community. Jill is also on the faculty of the master’s program at the School of the Art Institute and serves as a Commissioner on the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission.

Before joining the Nature Museum, Jill was a freelance writer and consultant, writing for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, Garden Design, and WBEZ-FM’s “Eight Forty-Eight.” She wrote the “Field & Street” column for the Chicago Reader. Jill has also consulted on open space plans for the City of Chicago, writing the land use plan for the Calumet Area and the Chicago Nature and Wildlife Plan, and worked at Openlands Project, a regional land conservation organization, and The Nature Conservancy’s Illinois field office. She is a member of Mayor Daley’s Landscape Task Force and a graduate of Northwestern University.